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Update: Now that social curation site Pinterest has become the hot-new social thing, with loads of traffic and highly addicted community, it seems to be time for spammers to take advantage of its traffic and intense virality.

Earlier this evening, some kind of spam-exploit injected javascript code that started replacing many Pinterest photos with ads for Best Buy. (see photo.) The actions resulted in disgruntled users blaming Pinterest. A recent study claimed that Pinterest was referring more traffic on the web.

Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn — combined. That’s according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 referral trafficreport, which is based on aggregated data from more than 200,000 publishers that reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors each month.

In the era of social, what is amazing is how quickly the spam attacks can spread and have an impact. I sincerely hope Pinterest has brought this under control. I for one, am rooting for that hot little company.

Update: Pinterest co-founder/CEO Ben Silbermann emailed with this statement: “We had an opportunity to identify the problem and put in a fix a couple hours after a user reported it to us. We are keeping a close eye on it this weekend.”