Slashdot Mirror
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."
Does hotmail have no security at all to detect bot created accounts? 60+% of all them. That's ridiculous.
Of course Twitter is a spam magnet. Twitter won't let people write Twitter clients with spam filters.
Now you're just making stuff up.
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.
They gave $5000 to Twitter account merchants. It doesn't seem to me that was the smartest thing to do with the money if you actually want to discourage this kind of activity.
I had the same idea, but now I wonder how much they managed to raise autogenerated twitter account price. 5000 USD could be seen as an investment
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.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
You haven't been hoarding yours like the rest of us?
Nearly every spam I get these days uses the t.co link shortener to disguise the destination of the links. I report every one through Spamcop, which reports them to abuse@twitter.com, but it never seems to make a difference.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
If by spending $5,000 you manage to get information that leads to $100,000 worth of accounts being disabled before they can be used and increases the cost of creating new accounts then it seems to me like it's a very good way to discourage that activity.
Why would anyone pay money to buy an account that lets you tell people what color your belly-button lint is today?
In order to get anyone to read a feed off twitter.com, you have to get them to subscribe to it -- if you go to twitter.com all you get is a sign-up form, you can't even browse or search to see what the site is about. You certainly can't find some randomly created account -- this scam seems pointless.
Of what possible use is one of these auto-generated accounts? The article does not explain.
Anyone?
Let's put aside for a moment that Twitter is one of the very stupidest things to come along in quite some time: a service for illiterate chimpanzees with attention-deficit disorder, as nobody of worth or value would bother reading or writing 140 characters at a time. Let's just pretend, for the sake of argument, that it's a useful service worth defending.
First, putting money into the pockets of its adversaries is idiotic.
Second, pretending that content/context filtering based on examination of their CURRENT methods will work TOMORROW is equally idiotic. (This is a recurring mistake among many wanna-be anti-spammers: they blithely presume that spammers will sit on their hands while countermeasures are developed and deployed, even though the multi-decade history of spammers demonstrates conclusively that they will not.)
Third, pretending that countermeasures which may be temporarily successful against a subset of spammers will enjoy long-term success against a significantly larger set of spammers is wishful thinking. (This is another recurring mistake among the wanna-be's: they don't realize that they've targeted the least-competent spammers. They're too busy patting themselves on the back to realize that all they've really accomplished is to clear the playing field for the professionals.)
Fourth, these researchers have failed -- completely -- to account for the presence of spammer allies inside Twitter. It is of course short-sighted, naive and very stupid to neglect this, since it's obvious on inspection that a nonzero number of Twitter staff are complicit in spamming activities. (And why not? The chances they'll be caught are tiny. The extra income is tax-free. And they can take multiple payoffs from multiple people for doing the same thing. Unless one wishes to make the patently absurd argument that 100.000% of Twitter employees are incorruptible, which of course is laughable and instantly disqualifies the speaker from serious conversation.)
The bottom line is that Twitter made a fundamental error before they even launched: they failed to perform an adversarial analysis, to ask themselves "how can our service be abused?" and then modify the design to deal with as many answers to that as possible. (This is hardly unique: many others have made the exact same mistake. Some are making it today.) Their failure to perform this analysis BEFORE finalizing design and deployment means that they're now left trying to backfill it. That has never worked. It's not working now. It's not going to work. So this little endeavor represents merely some feeble half-hearted attempt to deal with a tiny piece of an enormous problem...and event that attempt is doomed to fail as soon as spammers find it to be an inconvenience.
beliebers are bots. That's the problem.
Sheep need to be feed.
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