The Prof Says “Go Get Crypto”: … The Rise of the Intelligent Bot Hackers

It has now been revealed that, over the past few months, there has been a massive botnet of over 15,000 strong that has been scraping social media and cloning IDs. The “bots” have use machine learning to understand how best to target users, and have evolved their operation over time so that it could not be detected.

Overall it involved over 88 million Twitter accounts, and that was just the activity over a period of May 2018 to July 2018. The bots detect those who post relevant content and who are influential in the space of cryptocurrencies, and copy names and profile pictures.They then tweet around a cryptocurrency give-away. Quickly, too they gather what seemed to be real followers, and have a profile which have likes.

The researcher who detected the botnet outlines:

“[Searching for connected bots] resulted in a 3 tiered botnet structure consisting of the scam publishing bots, the hub accounts (if any) the bots were following, and the amplification bots that like each created tweet. The mapping shows that the amplification bots like tweets from both clusters, binding them together.”

Here is the full article: