Instagram's fruit spam is back, this time with smoothie pictures

The Instagram fruit-attack is back. Nearly a month after a spam-wave strangely promoting fruit diets plagues the photo-sharing app, the issue is back.

Nishtha Kanal|Jul 29, 2013, 13:07:09 IST

The Instagram fruit-attack is back. Nearly a month after a spam-wave strangely promoting fruit diets plagued the photo-sharing app, the issue is back and this time the fruits have been blended into smoothies.

Instagram users, over the weekend, took to Twitter to complain that many of their accounts had been hacked into to post images of smoothies, all without their permission. The hack also saw the appearance of a strange URL in the affected accounts’ bios. Strangely enough, reports of users getting locked out of their accounts after trying to reset their passwords also emerged.

Big security breach definitely happening on Instagram. This is the third hacked account I've seen including mine. pic.twitter.com/sWvoZBeVIo
— Graham Hancock (@grahamhancock) July 27, 2013

Instagram released a statement acknowledging the existence of the smoothie-hack. “Last night a small portion of our users experienced a spam incident where unwanted photos were posted from their accounts,” it said. “Our security and spam team quickly took actions to secure the accounts involved, and the posted photos are being deleted.”

The planted images were essentially pictures of smoothies promoting a kind of a special healthy diet. The description of the image would point users to the bio where the infected link was posted. The Verge reports that in most cases, the pictures would disappear even as users started to notice something amiss with their accounts but the URLs in the bios would remain.

Got hacked on @instagram. Wtf. pic.twitter.com/m6we1Z0RCE
— drew olanoff (@drew) July 27, 2013

Instagram seems to be working on the issue and those users locked out of their accounts can hope to get hold of their accounts soon. However, the frequency with which these hacks and spammy links seem to be spreading could spell trouble for the Facebook owned photo-sharing service. As for the rest who are not affected, a note of caution - if you see a suspicious looking link on your friend’s Instagram profile coupled with a delicious looking smoothie, you should probably not click on it, regardless of whether or not you would like quick-fixes to get rid of that flab.