Hackers Are So Fed Up With Twitter Bots They're Hunting Them Down Themselves (theintercept.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Even if Twitter hasn't invested much in anti-bot software, some of its most technically proficient users have. They're writing and refining code that can use Twitter's public application programming interface, or API, as well as Google and other online interfaces, to ferret out fake accounts and bad actors. The effort, at least among the researchers I spoke with, has begun with hunting bots designed to promote pornographic material -- a type of fake account that is particularly easy to spot -- but the plan is to eventually broaden the hunt to other types of bots. The bot-hunting programming and research has been a strictly volunteer, part-time endeavor, but the efforts have collectively identified tens of thousands of fake accounts, underlining just how much low-hanging fruit remains for Twitter to prune.

Among the part-time bot-hunters is French security researcher and freelance Android developer Baptiste Robert, who in February of this year noticed that Twitter accounts with profile photos of scantily clad women were liking his tweets or following him on Twitter. Aside from the sexually suggestive images, the bots had similarities. Not only did these Twitter accounts typically include profile photos of adult actresses, but they also had similar bios, followed similar accounts, liked more tweets than they retweeted, had fewer than 1,000 followers, and directed readers to click the link in their bios.

Comments

I am doing that

[fabiomb]

I started finding bots on twitter since a few years, first as a hobby, but then i write some code and start to find patterns. I even ended in the local news because my findings. The bots are evolving because the bot creators need to keep them alive and working more and more, there is a huge business and it gives a lot of money. My actual software has a catalog of more than 50k users with political affiliations (from Argentina), some 10k fake accounts, and fake accounts are more important than bots. The problem is: a bot is detectable because it follows predictable patterns, but a fake account used by a human is... very human like. So you can't detect it, is not so obvious, if you say something to them they answer you, and is a real human there. Fake accounts are the real problem, so my research moved from bots to fakes, still capturing bots (easy part), but identifying fakes is the most hard job here. And i'm only working with Argentina accounts because we have a very active political twitter bubble, and because Twitter has limits in it's API, i think if i move to a bigger country the thing will be amazingly huge. My actual database has 10GB worth of tweets, many of them a nice feed for Machine Learning, my next development :P sorry for my limited english ;)