Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter
The networks of fake accounts can be used to boost
followers or post junk messages
January 24, 2017 8 hours ago
Massive collections of fake accounts are lying dormant on
Twitter, suggests research.
The largest network ties together more than 350,000
accounts and further work suggests others may be even bigger.
UK researchers accidentally uncovered the lurking
networks while probing Twitter to see how people use it.
Some of the accounts have been used to fake follower
numbers, send spam and boost interest in trending topics.
Hidden purpose
On Twitter, bots are accounts that are run remotely by
someone who automates the messages they send and activities they carry out.
Some people pay to get bots to follow their account or to dilute chatter about
controversial subjects.
"It is difficult to assess exactly how many Twitter
users are bots," said graduate student Juan Echeverria, a computer
scientist at UCL, who uncovered the massive networks.
Mr Echeverria's research began by combing through a
sample of 1% of Twitter users in order to get a better understanding of how
people use the social network.
However, analysis of the data revealed some strange
results that, when probed further, seemed to reveal lots of linked accounts,
suggesting one person or group is running the botnet. These accounts did not
act like the bots other researchers had found but were clearly not being run by
humans.
His research suggests earlier work to find bots has
missed these types of networks because they act differently to the most obvious
automated accounts.
The researchers are now asking the public via a website
and a Twitter account to report bots they spot to help get a better idea of how
prevalent they are. Many bots are obvious because they have been created
recently, have few followers, have strange user names and little content in the
messages.
The network of 350,000 bots stood out because all the
accounts in it shared several subtle characteristics that revealed they were
linked. These included:
tweets coming from places where nobody lives
messages being posted only from Windows phones
almost exclusively including quotes from Star Wars novels
It was "amazing and surprising" to discover the
massive networks, said Dr Shi Zhou, a senior lecturer from UCL who oversaw Mr
Echeverria's research.
"Considering all the efforts already there in
detecting bots, it is amazing that we can still find so many bots, much more
than previous research," Dr Zhou told the BBC.
Twitter deserved praise for its work on finding and
eliminating bots, he added, but it was clear that skilled hackers had found
ways to avoid official scrutiny and keep the bots ticking over.
The pair's most recent work had uncovered a bigger
network of bots that seemed to include more than 500,000 accounts.
"Their potential threats are real and scary due to
the sheer size of the botnet," he said.
It was hard to know who was behind the collections of
fake accounts, said Dr Zhou, although there was evidence that a small
percentage of the accounts had been sold or rented as they were now following
Twitter users outside the main bot network.
"What is really surprising is our questioning on the
whole effort of bot detection in the past years," said Dr Zhou.
"Suddenly we feel vulnerable and don't know much: how many more are there?
What do they want to do?"
A Twitter spokesman said the social network had clear
policy on automation that was "strictly enforced".
Users were barred from writing programs that
automatically followed or unfollowed accounts or which "favourited"
tweets in bulk, he said.
Automated responses "degraded" the experience
for other users and was prohibited, he added.
"While we have systems and tools to detect spam on
Twitter, we also rely on our users to report spamming," he said.
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