Application security

Adult webcam spam sends sexters to Kik

Symantec has discovered that most adult webcam spam leads to Kik, an instant messaging service for all smartphones, according to a Thursday blog post on the Symantec website.

Symantec began tracking the trend last year, with the first cross advertising for Kik spam surfacing on Twitter in 2013 at the end of the summer. Certain keywords sent in tweets, typically with sexual connotations, would illicit a response from spam bots, often posing a females, using the same word or words in reply.

The security company also discovered Tinder spam accounts in July of last year that “worked natively within Tinder to push adult webcam spam,” but, within months, “the bots were reprogrammed to direct users to Kik Messenger with the promise of sexting,” said the blog post. More recently, Kik users have been targeted, prompting the company to opt users into a “Notify for New People” feature, which, the blog post said, “hides messages from new people that you have never chatted with.”

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