URGENT: Invasion of the Old Account Hijackers by Colonel-Knight-Rider, journal
URGENT: Invasion of the Old Account Hijackers
Since mid-autumn 2018, I've been seeing a number of legitimate-looking DeviantArt accounts who've been around for years and whose owners have, depending on the account, established decent bodies of work and have interacted in non-suspicious ways with other Deviants…but those were all years ago, and they're now suddenly and randomly adding my work as well as that of others to their favorites. I can tell the accounts are all being hijacked because every About section or most recent status update of each hijacked page contains in its text a spam link to a pornography Website.
On December 15, 2019, MutantEnjin (https://www.deviantart.com/mutantenjin) made the critical discovery
Hi! I just to wanted to share what I've noticed lately on DeviantArt. There have been a lot of bot accounts that add random deviations to their favorites. I've contacted DeviantArt Help Desk about it, but I haven't heard from them yet. These bot accounts rarely seem to comment or send notes (anymore), because then it would be easy to report the comments and notes as spam, but you can't report activity notifications as spam. One option would be to add these bots to your blocked list, but it takes time and there's a limit how many entries you can put in there (500). These bot accounts can be new or very old unused accounts that have been hacked. Some of the hacked accounts are over 10 years old and have not been active for 10 years, but suddenly in 2021 they start to add random deviations to their favorites. You can recognize these bot accounts by looking for these links on their DA page: "hi i am username please rate my..." or "blog username". If you hold your mouse cursor on top of