Thread by @conspirator0

Oh look, more pornbots. For a change of pace (and obfuscation of search results), these accounts emblazon the website they promote on the images in their tweets rather than linking it from their tweets or profiles. #TuesdayThoughts

cc: @ZellaQuixote

We found 699 accounts that we believe belong to this pornbot network. All were created in batches in April 2020 or later, all tweet exclusively via "Twitter Web App", have followed no accounts, liked no tweets, and watermark their image tweets with kunee(dot)me.

The website promoted by these bots, kunee(dot)me, has the interesting feature of presenting visitors with a brief quiz before forwarding them to actual porn sites. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that data harvesting is part of the goal.

In addition to the images promoting the website, each tweet posted by these pornbots contains a quote (usually from a well-known author) and a couple of hashtags. The botnet uses 560 hashtags with roughly equal frequency, with rare appearances of others.

154 of the 699 accounts in this pornbot network have default profile pics. The remainder (or at least those we checked at random) appear to be stolen. We found TinEye to be more effective than Google or Yandex at finding the images used by this botnet.