Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Discover Large Twitter Botnet Pushing Ethereum Scam (techcrunch.com)
Trailrunner7 writes: Twitter has something of a bot problem. Anyone who uses the platform on even an occasional basis likely could point out automated accounts without much trouble. But detecting bots at scale is a much more complex problem, one that a pair of security researchers decided to tackle by building their own classifier and analyzing the characteristics and behavior of 88 million Twitter accounts. Using a machine learning model with a set of 20 distinct characteristics such as the number of tweets relative to the age of the account and the speed of replies and retweets, the classifier is able to detect bots with about 98 percent accuracy. The tool outputs a probability that a given account is a bot, with anything above 50 percent likely being a bot.
During their research, conducted from May through July, Jordan Wright and Olabode Anise of Duo Security discovered an organized network of more than 15,000 bots that was being used to promote a cryptocurrency scam. The botnet, which is still partially active, spoofs many legitimate accounts and even took over some verified accounts as part of a scheme designed to trick victims into sending small amounts of the cryptocurrency Ethereum to a specific address. Unlike most botnets, the Ethereum network has a hierarchical structure, with a division of labor among the bots. Usually, each bot in a network performs the same task, whether that's launching a DDoS attack or mining Bitcoin on a compromised machine. But the Ethereum botnet had clusters of bots with a three-tier organization. Some of the bots published the scam tweets, while others amplified those tweets or served as hub accounts for others to follow. Wright and Anise mapped the social media connections between the various accounts and looked at which accounts followed which others to create a better picture of the network. Anise and Wright will discuss the results of their research during a talk at the Black Hat USA conference on Wednesday and will release their detection tool as an open source project that day, too.
During their research, conducted from May through July, Jordan Wright and Olabode Anise of Duo Security discovered an organized network of more than 15,000 bots that was being used to promote a cryptocurrency scam. The botnet, which is still partially active, spoofs many legitimate accounts and even took over some verified accounts as part of a scheme designed to trick victims into sending small amounts of the cryptocurrency Ethereum to a specific address. Unlike most botnets, the Ethereum network has a hierarchical structure, with a division of labor among the bots. Usually, each bot in a network performs the same task, whether that's launching a DDoS attack or mining Bitcoin on a compromised machine. But the Ethereum botnet had clusters of bots with a three-tier organization. Some of the bots published the scam tweets, while others amplified those tweets or served as hub accounts for others to follow. Wright and Anise mapped the social media connections between the various accounts and looked at which accounts followed which others to create a better picture of the network. Anise and Wright will discuss the results of their research during a talk at the Black Hat USA conference on Wednesday and will release their detection tool as an open source project that day, too.
Him and fake Hispanic Bob O Rourke. Lame pajama boi supporters luv his ass.
Only idiots concern themselves with krypto kurrency.
We love the tolerance and peace of the left, as personified in your post!
islands changing from 300 quakes per day to less than 10 is remarkable? not even mentionable?
This has now been proven, great. Anyone looking at tweets from people involved in the space immediately runs across these. It’s clearly automated... is that somehow less bot that a real bot?
Hi Beau, my username is as follows.
; DROP TABLE users
I don't think anybody needs offers of mod points from a fake BeauHD account that spends (sad!) days sucking Vladimir Putin's cock directly for Traitor Drumpf. Sorry, you have no actual value to offer. You're worthless here.
I truly hope you're earning the few rubles required to feed your family and that's the reason you waste your time here, Belarus.
i love it when the libtards get all mad when i exercise my right to harass people with dead kids out of town. like lol, triggered much you intolerant lefties?
Cryptocurrencies were a nice idea.
Using "mining" to *create* them, is where it went full retard.
I'll only ever use cryptocurrencies that cannot be created or destroyed, period.
How many people are shorting Twitter stock? Seems like the whole thing is on the path to extinction.
People here seem to know very accurately how many are shorting Tesla, so what about Twitter? (I don't know how to find this out).
"Ethereum scam" is redundant because Ethereum is already a scam. Well, unless you want your unbreakable, unchangeable contract to be rolled back because someone with more Ethereum wants it rolled back. They have done that more than once - when will they decide arbitrarily to do it again?
Except for hate speech against Jews and Mexicans and Arabs and Iranians and Germans and black people. Oh, and hate speech against women and queers is fine. That kind of hate speech seems to be okay here. Right? I mean, just look back at previous postings. It really lifts the intellectual side of things on this site.
They could have, at any point, implemented a captcha and removed from followings any account inactive for 3 months, requiring complex captchas to reactivate.
Why haven't they done this?
Because their market value would crash.
Here's how you can tell if an offer on Twitter or anywhere else for that matter is a scam: Does it involve Ethereum or Bitcoin or Dogggeecoin or some other shit like that? Then yes. It is a scam. (It may also be a scam if it does NOT involve them, but if it does-- scam.) You're welcome.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
"Large Twitter Botnet" sounds redundant.
Where you are the product. The free part is the bait.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Trump will be better hung in death than in life, deal with it traitor snowflakes. You mad, traitor? #Prison for Junior?
Good
Which is basically none of them.
The biggest scam operates in plain sight!
https://www.ethereum.org/
Now can we get the output of their system fed into Twitter's banning system? Please?
I mute most of those "free eth" tweets and it helps a bit, but it would be nice not to have to.
Not even a competent attempt. You need to at least assume the result is stored as a string, so maybe take that into account with an apostophe, huh?
'; DROP TABLE USERS;
There's a few accounts posing as Elon Musk offering to give away Bitcoin and Ethereum as a "thank you for support". Click on any Twitter post by Musk and it's one of the top replies.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Twitter has something of a bot problem.
The whole platform has been a dumpster fire of bots since the beginning.
Where's the AI?
I "just" have to find out, how to measure real actual work done. In a fair way.
Seems like a scam on top of a scam!