Has your Pinterest account been hacked and autoposting to your Twitter? Check your Twitter apps page too.

Update: a note on terminology, at the end (hacking v phishing)

I've spotted a couple of people I follow on Twitter sending out a tweet promoting Garcinia cambogia extract which is yet another weight loss supplement, this one apparently advertised by Dr Oz (though he's not behind the spamming).

However they didn't write the tweet, it actually came from their (separate) Pinterest account which, because they've authorised it to post to Twitter on their behalf, meant that these nonsense tweets showed up.

At the moment you can't tell from looking at someone's profile on Twitter.com what app they've tweeted with. They might be tweeting from a desktop / laptop computer, using Twitter.com's interface (ie 'from web') or from an app on their tablet or smartphone. Twitter used to share that info, it doesn't now (presumably to discourage advertising other services when it has its own app that it wants people to use).

However some apps do still provide this information and Echofon for iPhone is one of them. Searching for the relevant tweets from my friends I saw that they'd been sent by the Pinterest app and searching for references to Garcinia cambogia brought up plenty more examples of tweets emitted by Pinterest. It also became clear that a few people's Pinterest accounts had been hacked.

At first I thought people had had their Twitter account hacked or phished but it seems that it's Pinterest, not Twitter.

What to do?
To stop emitting tweets you'll need to revoke access to Pinterest. This stops it from being able to tweet on your behalf - go to the Apps section of your Settings, and revoke it: https://twitter.com/settings/applications

You will also need to check your Pinterest page as it's likely that you now have rubbish pics pinned on there by someone else.

What's happening here?
Your Pinterest account was hacked or phished, someone started posting rubbish photos on there in the hope that you'd previously set up an autopost to Twitter. If you had that set up then bingo for them as your Twitter feed is now pinging out adverts for someone's weight loss supplements and you may not be aware of it as your Twitter account is otherwise uncompromised.

I authorised Pinterest in 2012 as a log in only, I don't think it can tweet on my behalf, though it will be interesting to see (I've not revoked it as I'm curious to see what might happen).

Note that if even if you don't have your Pinterest hooked up to your Twitter it's still possible that your Pinterest account has been hacked anyway, but any damage is probably less obvious.

The take-home messages for me are:

• Echofon and other apps can give you background intelligence about which app is being used to send a tweet. By itself that information may not be particularly illuminating but it can be useful (eg to see, more generally, if an account is a real person or always posting via automated systems)
• Your Twitter account can be indirectly 'hacked' by hacking of another system which is hooked up to it. Not surprising and not unknown but interesting to see it happening so... almost covertly here.

This isn't a new technique, even for Garcinia spam which has been doing the rounds for at least a year and the blog post below shows before that it was the well-known Acai berry spam: http://www.threattracksecurity.com/it-blog/garcinia-cambogia-spam-a-timeline-and-new-outbreaks/

Don't buy Garcinia cambogia - no evidence for it, certainly no evidence that the pills you're buying even contain it (and they may contain something much worse). And check your Pinterest account (and Twitter apps) :)

Terms used - update
When I posted this on Twitter Tim Haines pointed out that I was fibbing a bit by talking about hacking. He's kind of right, so I'm clarifying the meanings by pointing to Wikipedia:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28computer_security%29

Building the picture pipeline - free images for use in healthcare and medical research #scicomm #nhssm

Years ago I helped the then editor of our research magazine (Research Matters) find some illustrative images to go with short summaries of our various bits of research. I remember in particular looking for things that conveyed 'kidneys' to match the section on our kidney research.

There are some standard-issue visual tropes for kidneys, including pictures of actual kidneys (either photographs or drawings, including the urinary system), kidney-shaped metal dishes, kidney beans and even, if you're so minded, steak and kidney pies. 

It's worth clicking on this image and seeing the original image in Flickr as the photographer has added a really nice explanation of what it is that kidneys do and why they're rather important.

But the concept of kidneys can also be put across by images of clear water - after all the job of the kidneys is to filter and clean blood, and conserve things that the body wants to keep. Even the concept of a fuse might be used in relation to the role the kidneys play in blood pressure and how this can damage them. You might even get away with 'balance' in that our kidneys keep everything in order.

I found that being in the role of someone who picks the pics made me think much more laterally about images in general, which I'm sure is all to the good. Although we have a budget for the CHI+MED project that I'm currently working on, and I have bought one or two images from commercial image suppliers, I've derived a lot of enjoyment in looking through what Flickerians have made available through creative commons licensing. 

I've even created a Pinterest pin board of 'images that illustrate the CHI+MED project' - I wouldn't say it's gone viral but it has 21 followers compared to the average 8-12 that my other boards have acquired.

  

In the recent #nhssm (use of social media in the NHS) Twitter chat, which focused on the way that the NHS might use Pinterest, a number of people queried the copyright issue (I only use CC images, with appropriate accreditation that Pinterest automates). 

This reminded me of a question I've probably asked before which is - should we try and build up a 'database' (it could be a list of links and signposting, or a Flickr pool) of images that research scientists, people in medical research charities or the NHS (or any healthcare) can use freely in their documents, leaflets, websites, whatever - with appropriate attribution. It would be cool if people could also use it to request images too...

This probably already exists - where? I didn't find such a thing on Flickr (it might be somewhere else that I don't know about) so I have created.... drumroll...  Health, medicine and research images - it's a group on Flickr which currently has no images, but I shan't fill it with them yet in case someone comes along and points me to the already-invented wheel elsewhere on the web.

Going back to Research Matters I was delighted (and a bit amazed) to find a picture of piles of white paper which I could use to illustrate research grant applications, which at the time came in on paper (now all electronic). We actually took some photographs ourselves of the piles of paper created by making sure that each member of the research committee (who recommended projects for funding) had a copy of every single application under consideration, and used these in our own material. 

People working in a lab will be used to their boxes of pipette tips and the purple nitrile gloves, centrifuge machines, microscopes and blue-topped Schott glasses - they're part of the furniture. But images of them do a terrific job of saying "RESEARCH". Similarly if you work in a hospital you'll walk past the signage every day and one hospital bed probably looks like another, but I can't easily get hold of images that say "HOSPITAL" without either going to one myself or being lucky enough to find cool stuff that others have shared.

  

So... please take pictures of things that you might think are fairly mundane, and share them on Flickr with a Creative Commons license so that others can use them. Make sure you give them relevant titles and tag them appropriately - the trick is to think of words that other people would use to search for them. I might search for 'kidney' but someone looking for pictures to illustrate their renal replacement service for a leaflet for patients might search for 'renal'.

Here's what I've found so far:

Free stuff

Flickr Creative Commons - Advanced search

This link will let you search all images licensed under CC and this one will let you search the smaller pool of images that are both CC licensed and may be used commercially. You will need to check with individual images what you can do with them (eg if you want to crop them to fit a smaller space etc, this isn't automatically permitted in every license so do check).

List of free resources
53+ Free image resources for your blog and social media posts Buffer (14 May 2014)

Public domain photos
http://publicphoto.org/

Not necessarily free stuff

Flickr groups - note that these images might not be available under CC licensing but there's nothing to stop you asking an individual photographer if you can use them. 

• Laboratory Science - for fans of glassware old and new
• Medical images
• Science & Research in Europe
• Hospital pix - images from inside hospitals
• Search all groups

Other stuff

• Graphic design and picture resources (25 February 2010) - a blogpost by me on some of the image resources I've come across on my travels.
• Images that illustrate the CHI+MED project - my Pinboard, all images are creative commons on Flickr.