What is it? A blast from the past, in the form of Myspace profiles serving up various health promos instead of musicians. No, really.
Why is it a problem? It appears someone has been putting various forms of health / diet / muscle pill promos on Myspace pages. It seems likely that these pages were set up specifically to host the promos and don’t belong to compromised musicians. However, in theory riding on the coat-tails of legitimate musicians (by, say, grabbing unclaimed usernames of new and upcoming artists or creating ones which appear similar to the real deal) could drive traffic to potentially dubious pages.
Who is at risk? Compromising and / or imitating a musician or someone else with a lot of reach can convince end-users that what they’re seeing is official, or endorsed by said individual. Anything from spam to Malware could be the end result.
So, Myspace. Once upon a time compromising musicians there could lead to disastrous results for end-users, hammered by Malware and infection files via high-profile pages.
Nowadays, I’m not even sure who these spammers are aiming for but it’s interesting to note that the cookie-cutter tactics of “Here’s some diet pill spam” has even made it across to the shores of Myspace (thanks, URLQuery).
None of the profiles appear to be musicians that have been compromised (though it’s hard to tell – none of these pages are in the Internet Archive and they already show as they do below in Google Cache) …instead they seem to be spam profiles set up to direct end-users to pills, diets and body improvements.
The health / diet spam sites are hosted on Tumblr.
Using Tumblr for diet and health sites is quite a contemporary tactic – using Myspace for the jump-off point, not so much.
It just goes to show that spammers will attempt to leverage any and all social networks in their quest to have end-users spend some money or sign up to offers.
Christopher Boyd
