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Twitter Used To Control Botnet Machines
DikSeaCup writes "Arbor Network's Jose Nazario, an expert on botnets, discovered what looks to be the first reported case of hackers using Twitter to control botnets. 'Hackers have long used IRC chat rooms to control botnets, and have continually used clever technologies, such as peer-to-peer strategies, to counter efforts to track, disrupt and sometimes decapitate the bots. Perhaps what's surprising then is that it's taken so long for hackers to take Twitter to the dark side.' The next step, of course, is to code the tweets in such a way that they aren't so suspicious."
Sure Twitter is just a large botnet, but is anyone really in control?
Who knew Twitter had a use?!?!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"Twitter Used To Control Botnet Machines"
It used to, but it doesn't anymore, right?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
No onE would Think of uSing slashdoT As we aRen'T nearly as oBviOus as someThiNg likE Twitter. // Especially with all our talk about supporting Linux and such.
Sure they tried using Twitter to control their botnet but after sending out one set of instructions they got bored and went back to playing MafiaWars on Facebook.
Hmm... so you're saying I should take out this cron entry...
... that I added per the instructions in some stranger's .sig?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The next step, of course, is to code the tweets in such a way that they aren't so suspicious
And people said that perl obfuscation, poetry, and golf tournaments didn't have any practical application. Ha!
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
There's already a botnet like that, but it runs on poorly-secured human brains rather than computers.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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[to be posted uh tomorrow, probably]
Only 98% of Twitter updates are "pointless babble," says a new report that studied 2,000 tweets over a period of two weeks.
The top category was "pointless babble" tweets, with nearly 98% of tweets being inanity no sane person could want to read, retweets of inanity, links to inanity, retweets of links to inanity and retweets of retweets of links to links to the reretweet itself. And camera phone pictures of bowel movements on Twitpic.
Almost 2% was Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman or retweets thereof and the rest was Warren Ellis posting scatological abuse of his fans.
Botnet command messages were becoming more popular, many disguised as combinations of the syllables "lol" "wtf" "d00d" "RT" and "#fb" or scatological abuse of Warren Ellis's fans.
Twitter's demographics as of June 2009 were 55% female, 43% ages 18 to 34, 78% white, and 99.5% of such short attention spans that Facebook might as well be War and Peace. Botnet readership was considered likely to rise as soon, nothing with organic intelligence would be able to cope.
Twitter recently redesigned its homepage, changing the tag "What are you doing now?" to "Post tomorrow's CNN headlines, particularly about #goatse."
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