Massive Cryptocurrency Botnet Scam Unearthed on Twitter

While fake cryptocurrency accounts on Twitter may pass off as failed tactics to amateur investors, a major security researcher believes the epidemic is an elaborately-planned, carefully-executed cyberattack consisting of thousands of spam accounts.

According to TechCrunch, U.S.-based Duo Security recently released a report that detailed the elaborate steps utilized by hackers to infiltrate millions of Twitter accounts.

From this broad dataset, Duo found that "Over 15,000" accounts were exclusively dedicated to spamming the official Twitter pages of digital asset businesses, in addition to impersonating cryptocurrency personalities.

Duo identified and executed a mechanism to identify Twitter account information-solely focusing on the extent of bot attacks and their influence on the microblogging giant.

To collate data, Duo used data enrichment protocols on Twitter's Application Programming Interface to fish for details from 88 million public Twitter accounts while crawling over an estimated 500 million tweets.

Duo ascertains the total bots on Twitter is "Likely much more" than 15,000, which employ a variety of methods to scam amateurs, with the company singling out the dreaded, and often annoying, "Crypto giveaways."

The company expressed surprise over Twitter's inaction to mitigate its platform from the risk of bot attacks, pointing out the blatant copying of legitimate Twitter accounts, such as news organizations, cryptocurrency businesses, personalities and even taking over verified "Blue tick" accounts.

As stated in the report, a Twitter official confirmed the firm was "Aware of this form of manipulation," adding they are "Proactively" developing account detection techniques to weed out deceptive accounts.

"In many cases, spammy content is hidden on Twitter on the basis of automated detections. When spammy content is hidden on Twitter from areas like search and conversations, that may not affect its availability via the API. This means certain types of spam may be visible via Twitter's API even if it is not visible on Twitter itself. Less than 5 percent of Twitter accounts are spam-related."

"The goal is to give them an artificial popularity so that if I'm the victim and I'm scrolling through Twitter and I come across these tweets I'm more likely to think that they're legitimate based on how often they've been retweeted or how many times they've been liked."