Malicious Links Hidden in Image Links
Recently, as some of you may know, my blog was temporarily removed by Tumblr. The reason given was that I had posted malicious links. As I don’t generally post links, I was really confused by this. Tumblr did eventually give me some information about it, which I have posted at the bottom of this post.
The information just below was given to me by @hard2please72 and I thank him a great deal for it, it was a lot easier to understand. Many thanks to hi for the heads up, I really appreciate it!
If you use the mobile app, you’ll see the link in a grey box under the picture. If you’re on the web site, hover over the image and you should see where it points to in the lower left corner of your browser. If it’s a tumblr.com link, don’t worry about it. A lot of other links are safe as well (Instagram, Pinterest, etc) but if you’re not sure, don’t reblog.
Check out the box under the image… That’s the link I’m talking about. Bit.ly is usually bad news on tumblr because there’s no reason to use it unless you’re trying to hide something. In this case, the image will open a bunch of porn sites and one of them will try to deliver a virus.
You should consider deleting this post too.
I did as he suggested and am now reviewing all my posts. If I find a blog is reblogging a lot of images with these links, I will unfollow them, as it doesn’t matter how good a blog is, it is not worth getting my blog deleted by it.
Here is the info I was given by Tumblr;
There are two different methods to find these posts, both of which you can use:
Method 1:
On your Dashboard, click on Posts on the right side (click the blog menu just above Posts if you need to switch to another blog).
Start from your last post at the top of the page and scroll down while looking at your posts captions.
If you see one or more small gray rectangles in the caption under a post please delete it. Click the Gear icon to see the delete option.
Method 2:
Go to your Archive (add /archive to your blog URL, e.g staff.tumblr.com/archive).
Next, open the most recent post and look for the undesired content.
Continue opening posts in reverse-chronological order until you find a post that’s misbehaving.
Then, delete the post by clicking the trashcan icon in the top-right corner of the post.
If you’re using the Queue to publish on your blog, review the posts in it using the first method (click on Queue instead of Posts on the right side).
If you’re still experiencing pop-ups, redirections or ads when visiting your blog, it means there are still malicious posts to delete on your blog.
Now I have never seen any pop ups on my blog so was completely unaware that I had posted these kinds of links. I know that I have been on Tumblr for a while, but openly admit I am not across all these issues, though I will look into it more. It would be great if the was some sort of notification from Tumblr rather than just deletion.
IF YOU SEE ANY OF THESE TYPES OF LINKS ON MY BLOG THAT I HAVE MISSED IN MY CHECKS, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!!!