🤖 Researchers discover Twitter botnet dedicated to crypto scams

BlockworksAug 8, 2018 ⋅ 1 min read

Researchers have uncovered a large botnet that mimics legitimate accounts on Twitter to spread a cryptocurrency "giveaway" scam. According to ITPro, Duo Security looked at 88 million Twitter accounts from May to July and found a single network of over 15,000 bots in a three-tiered structure that spread the fake cryptocurrency giveaway. Bots first create a spoofed (or copycat) account for a genuine cryptocurrency-related account that would copy the name and profile picture of the legitimate account, then the bots would reply to tweets posted by the legitimate account, containing a link to entice Twitter users to the scam. Additionally, there are also "amplification bots" which give "likes" to scam tweets to artificially inflate the tweet's popularity [and] make the cryptocurrency scam appear legitimate. Further details about how the botnet works are detailed in this paper by Duo Labs.

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