Tumblr was recently hacked by a notorious group which posted an offensive racist fake blog post on the website’s user blogs.
The blogging website posted the following message on their Twitter page this morning, “We are aware that there is a viral post circulating on Tumblr. We are working to resolve the issue as swiftly as possible. Thank you.”
They also reminded users that if they see the fake post on Tumblr, to log out of any browsers that you’ve used on their website on right away.
A hacker group, responsible for the fake message, is known as GNAA, an anti-blogging group that attacks blogging websites and bloggers. Their fake post on Tumblr is no exception, as it uses obscenities and obnoxious terms in it. At the end of the post, the message reminds users that if they delete the post, they will delete their entire account.
GNAA tweeted that the post affected 3,800 Tumblr users, but Gizmodo reported that number jumped to 8,600. Unfortunately, those tweets were deleted.
If you use Tumblr, you may want to take heed. One analyst for Sophos, Graham Cluely, explained, “Anyone who was logged into Tumblr would automatically reblog the infectious post if they visited one of the offending pages. If you were not logged into Tumblr when your browser visited the url, it would simply redirect you to the standard login page. However, if your computer was logged into Tumblr, it would result in the GNAA content being reblogged on your own Tumblr.”
At 1:30 a representative for Tumblr said that at 1:30 pm Eastern Standard Time, the website’s engineers have corrected the issue and that things are back to to normal.
Unfortunately, there is usually no way to predict when virtual attacks will come. I’m glad that Tumblr was able to fix this issue pretty quickly, but they may want to take more stringent security measures in the future.
