Hyderabad: A large number of fake and bot accounts are advertising adult dating websites on Twitter. Previously 22,000 such accounts were found by a researcher with the global cyber security firm F-Secure, Andy Patel.
Now, Mr Patel says that there are at least 80,000 such accounts. These accounts have links to URLs in their description field that point to adult dating websites. Some of these accounts automatically follow the users.
In his earlier study in March, Mr. Patel had said, “These accounts seem like they're simply trying to advertise the "adult dating" sites linked in the account profiles. They do this by liking, retweeting, and following random Twitter accounts at random times, fishing for clicks. But I did find one that had been helping to sell stuff as well.”
After reporting about this particular handle and the other data collected, Twitter took action against most of the accounts. Later Patel modified his previous program and let it run again.
“After 24 hours, my new script identified just over 20,000 accounts. After 4 days, my script had found close to 44,000 accounts. And eight days later, the total was just over 80,000,” he posted in a blog on Friday.
While Twitter is yet to comment on this development, the new bots show many similarities to the previously discovered botnet like similar pictures, same URL shortening services and similar usage of the English language.
