I got added to the Slack communties #testing [1] and EmberJS without signing up on purpose, and I know at least one other person who also got a #testing invite. There was some speculation that this was caused by Slackin [2]
[1] http://hashtagtesting.com/
[2] https://github.com/rauchg/slackin
Discussion in #testing:
Ted Han [8:07 PM]
Yeah hi, i'm not sure how i got invited, or even what this slack is about
[8:07]
Testing i presume?
[8:08]
I'm a little curious what data source my email is being scraped from
Jia Qing Yap [8:12 PM]
joined #testing. Also, @sonya joined.
Sonya Mann [8:40 PM]
@knowtheory same, a random invite just showed up in my email inbox
Nihal Mirpuri [8:40 PM]
joined #testing
Sonya Mann [8:40 PM]
@beau same thing happened to me -- I also got an invite to EmberJS, which makes no sense
sam kreter [8:43 PM]
joined #testing
Sonya Mann [8:43 PM]
@timhordern why / how did you bulk invite a bunch of people?
new messages
Ted Han [8:45 PM]
sonya: yep i got the Emberjs Slack invitation as well as one for another slack called Dev4Slack
[8:46]
Seems like the invitations are through the Slackin' form, not actually from Tim Hordern
[8:47]
sonya: looks like we're both in the BotWiki slack
[8:47]
i'm guessing that's where our email addies are being scraped from
Sonya Mann [8:48 PM]
but... why?
Ted Han [8:48 PM]
Beats me.
I've copied in the note I've pinned to my Slack below which hopefully provides a bit of context, and a link for how to deactivate your account if you don't want to be part of the Slack anymore.
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Quick update: It appears the mass invite was the work of a malicious individual who copied a lot of emails from another Slack and utilised my registration server to spam invites out. Myself and a number of other Slack channel administrators are trying to coordinate our information and are working with the Slack Support team to identify the person/peoples responsible and see what action can be taken.
To be clear: Under no circumstance was your email or PII scraped or leaked by myself or my server in any way. The only information retained in this Slack is the information you choose to make public in chats or in the team directory, and your registration information as stored by Slack itself for your login. I'm really sorry if you received a spurious invite to this Slack, even if it does fit the theme of testing.
If you'd like to stick around, you are more than welcome to! If you just want out then you can follow these directions to Deactivate your account in Settings: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/203953146-Deactivat...
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I can only hypothesize as to why someone would do this - potentially aiming to overwhelm our Slackin registration servers, or DDoS the Slack invite API (Slack was rate limiting requests this morning, could be a coincidence).