
Did anyone else get bulk-invited to several Slack teams? - exolymph
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]<p>[1] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hashtagtesting.com&#x2F;
[2] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rauchg&#x2F;slackin<p>Discussion in #testing:<p>Ted Han [8:07 PM] 
Yeah hi, i&#x27;m not sure how i got invited, or even what this slack is about<p>[8:07] 
Testing i presume?<p>[8:08] 
I&#x27;m a little curious what data source my email is being scraped from<p>Jia Qing Yap [8:12 PM] 
joined #testing. Also, @sonya joined.<p>Sonya Mann [8:40 PM] 
@knowtheory same, a random invite just showed up in my email inbox<p>Nihal Mirpuri [8:40 PM] 
joined #testing<p>Sonya Mann [8:40 PM] 
@beau same thing happened to me -- I also got an invite to EmberJS, which makes no sense<p>sam kreter [8:43 PM] 
joined #testing<p>Sonya Mann [8:43 PM] 
@timhordern why &#x2F; how did you bulk invite a bunch of people?<p>new messages
Ted Han [8:45 PM] 
sonya: yep i got the Emberjs Slack invitation as well as one for another slack called Dev4Slack<p>[8:46] 
Seems like the invitations are through the Slackin&#x27; form, not actually from Tim Hordern<p>[8:47] 
sonya: looks like we&#x27;re both in the BotWiki slack<p>[8:47] 
i&#x27;m guessing that&#x27;s where our email addies are being scraped from<p>Sonya Mann [8:48 PM] 
but... why?<p>Ted Han [8:48 PM] 
Beats me.
======
TimHordern
Hey! I'm Tim Hordern, the owner of the hashtagtesting Slack group. As I
mentioned in the Slack chat, it seems like this was the work of a someone
scraping an email list from a different Slack and then spamming our
registration server to send you invites.

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.

\---

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...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/203953146-Deactivating-your-Slack-account)

\---

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).

~~~
exolymph
Solid reply -- thank you!

------
chtoric
The same happened to me, I woke up this morning with invites from #testing,
EmberJS and Slack Developer Hangout. I would really like to know why I got
invited to join these groups

