Researchers Buy Twitter Bots To Fight Twitter Spam

tsu doh nimh writes "The success of social networking community Twitter has given rise to an entire shadow economy that peddles dummy Twitter accounts by the thousands, primarily to spammers, scammers and malware purveyors. But new research on identifying bogus accounts has helped Twitter to drastically deplete the stockpile of existing accounts for sale, and holds the promise of driving up costs for both vendors of these shady services and their customers. Krebsonsecurity.com writes about a paper (PDF) being released today at the USENIX conference that details how researchers spent almost a year and $5,000 buying up accounts from 27 twitter account merchants, and then built templates to help Twitter detect accounts sold by these merchants — all with the aim of getting more of these bot accounts shut down before they can be used to spam legitimate Twitter users. The story goes into great detail on the lengths to which these account merchants will go to evade Twitter's anti-bot security measures."

Comments

Very easy to get rid of the majority of spam

[JazzXP]

Twitter should be blocking any post that is only a link sent to someone they've never interacted with before. That would remove 90% of the spam I receive there.

Re:Who cares

[Crypto Gnome]

You heard it here first, folks: Forget BitCoin , FUCKS are The Currency Of The Future!

Which , by definition, makes most slashdot'ers as poor as dirt.