Cybersecurity Experts Uncover Dormant Botnet of 350,000 Twitter Accounts

The business of selling followers seems shallower than ever before.
 
Dating profile of their twitter bot:
– Born in summer of 2013
– 350,000 siblings. Tends to agree with family.
– Educated. Will randomly quotes literature.
– Star wars fan
– Might follow you on twitter but will never mention you.
– Rural lifestyle. Lives in secluded uninhabited/table areas.
“The results were a shock. The machine-learning algorithm, with the help of some manual filtering, found some 350,000 accounts that had the same characteristics. These accounts had never tweeted more than 11 times, had fewer than 31 friends and were all produced by Twitter for Windows Phone. […]

 

The bots do this by tweeting quotes from novels to avoid machine-generated language, which can be easily detected. They never tweet urls or mention other Twitter users. And they have tweeted only a few times each to avoid detection for over or under use.”

Source (link and image):  https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603404/cybersecurity-experts-uncover-dormant-botnet-of-350000-twitter-accounts

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