Twitter Bots Drown Out Anti-Kremlin Tweets
Summary: Thousands of Twitter accounts created in advance, most of them established at the beginning of July 2011, were used to flood hashtags such as #триумфальная and #Navalny with pro-Kremlin and unrelated messages during protests over Russia's disputed parliamentary elections. Trend Micro's Maxim Goncharov observed 5-7 identical tweets from accounts that had been inactive for months and had only 10-20 prior tweets, and researchers inside Russia who asked not to be named identified thousands more accounts, most following each other and the account @master_boot.
What's compelling: A commenter priced the whole operation at roughly $300: a $150 TweetAttacks Pro license, captcha solving at $1.50 per 1,000, proxies at $1 per month, and a rented server - meaning anyone who wants to bury your message in noise can do it for the cost of a laptop.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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