Twitter Bots Use Likes, RTs for Intimidation
Summary: Krebs' Twitter account gained almost 12,000 new followers overnight, nearly matching the 12,000-plus retweets and likes his tweet about Putin received within hours, and an analysis found most were bot accounts. Similar bot storms hit Daily Beast reporter Joseph Cox, whose account was temporarily suspended after gaining hundreds of bot followers, and the Atlantic Council's DFRLab, whose tweet about a bot attack was retweeted more than 73,000 times.
Why it matters: The same botnet that amplifies fake news can weaponize a platform's own anti-abuse detection to temporarily shutter real journalists' accounts, and more than 75 percent of the 11,500-plus accounts cataloged were created before 2013, with 2,700 having zero followers.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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