Porn Spam Botnet Has Evil Twitter Twin
Summary: ZeroFOX found more than 86,262 automated Twitter accounts that generated over 8.6 million posts promoting porn and dating sites, drawing more than 30 million unique clicks between February and June 2017. The accounts used images of attractive women, aged roughly 20 percent of profiles at least a year before their first tweet, and shortened links through Google's goo.gl and .tk domains that redirected automated crawlers back to Twitter while sending real users to subscription dating sites run by California-based Deniro Marketing.
Why it matters: Thirty million clicks in five months shows that affiliate-driven social botnets remain lucrative, and ZeroFOX notes the same redirect-and-evasion approach could readily be repurposed to spread malware to users who trust a profile that looks real.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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