![]() Sure enough, that sly tweet was retweeted by bots more than 73,000 times before the tweet storm died down. ![]() ![]() Suspecting that DFRLab was now being followed by many more botted accounts that might retweet or otherwise react to any further tweets mentioning bot attacks, Nimmo cleverly composed another tweet about the bot attack - only this time CC’ing the and accounts. Those personal attacks - which included tweets and images lamenting the supposed death of DFR senior fellow Ben Nimmo - were then amplified and re-tweeted by tens of thousands of apparently automated accounts, according to a blost post published today by DFRLab. In a post about the incident, DFRLab said the attack used fake accounts to impersonate and attack its members. 28 and 29, a large Twitter botnet took aim at the account for the Digital Forensic Research Lab, a project run by the Atlantic Council, a political think-tank based in Washington, D.C. Let that sink in for a moment: A huge collection of botted accounts - the vast majority of which should be easily detectable as such - may be able to abuse Twitter’s anti-abuse tools to temporarily shutter the accounts of real people suspected of being bots! “Right after my Daily Beast story about suspicious activity by pro-Kremlin bots went live, my own account came under attack,” Cox wrote. This likely was the goal in the campaign against my site as well.Ĭox observed the same likely bot accounts that followed him following me and a short list of other users in the same order. These tweet and follow storms seem capable of tripping some kind of mechanism at Twitter that seeks to detect when accounts are suspected of artificially beefing up their follower counts by purchasing followers (for more on that dodgy industry, check out this post).Įarlier today, Daily Beast cybersecurity reporter Joseph Cox had his Twitter account suspended temporarily after the account was the beneficiary of hundreds of bot followers over a brief period on Tuesday. The botnet or botnets appear to be targeting people who are exposing the extent to which sock puppet and bot accounts on social media platforms can be used to influence public opinion.Īfter tweeting about my new bounty of suspicious-looking Twitter friends I learned from my legitimate followers on Twitter that wasn’t alone and that several journalists and nonprofit groups that have written recently about bot-like activity on Twitter experienced something similar over the past few days. Upon further examination, it appears that almost all of my new followers were compliments of a social media botnet that is being used to amplify fake news and to intimidate journalists, activists and researchers. This tweet about Putin generated more than 12,000 retweets and likes in a few hours.
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