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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Buying Battles in the War on Twitter Spam

Summary: Researchers from George Mason University, the International Computer Science Institute and UC Berkeley spent over $5,000 across ten months buying more than 121,000 fraudulent Twitter accounts from at least 27 underground sellers, at prices from $10 to $200 per thousand. After Twitter applied the team's merchant signatures to accounts registered during the study, it disabled 95 percent of the fraudulent accounts from those 27 sellers, and 90 percent of 14,067 accounts the researchers re-ordered afterward were dead on arrival.

Key Takeaway: At its peak, the tracked marketplace registered 60 percent of all accounts later suspended for spamming, and the merchants rebuilt within weeks - only 54 percent of 6,879 accounts bought two weeks after the takedown were suspended on arrival, which is the arms race a security leader inherits when abuse detection depends on signatures that age out.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Fraud & Scams
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