Thread by @conspirator0

The majority of this IFTTT botnet that was spamming automated votes in the #iHeartAwards earlier this year has been suspended by Twitter, but a few stragglers are still online and are now voting for Lаdy Gаgа in #MTVHottest 2020.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

Thus far, 42 voting spambots, all created between 2014 and 2016, have activated and cast 1747 votes for Lаdy Gаgа. An additional 190 of the original 1030 members of the botnet are not yet suspended and could still potentially join in.

All 42 bots posted spammy vote tweets via IFTTT this morning (July 18th 2020). Three of them (@maliksahero32, @maliksahero29, and @ucanplutonlu32) have subsequently activated and sent similar spammy #MTVHottest votes via TweetDeck.

The spam generated by this botnet has been picked up by at least one existing retweet bot, @tchromaticx, which retweets tweets containing "Lady Gaga". We're not sure what to make of this, but its tweets lack the "tweet source" field that indicates what app a tweet was sent with.

(we intentionally substituted some of the characters in Lаdy Gаgа's name with similar looking Unicode characters to avoid accidentally casting votes ourselves.)

Update: this #MTVHottest vote manipulation botnet fired off another IFTTT tweetstorm this morning, increasing the total number of votes it has cast to 2065. A few bots have been suspended and some new ones added, bringing the current size of the network to 45 accounts.