Did a whole bunch of identical-looking people join Twitter back in 2016? (Spoiler: nope, it's yet another botnet.) #MondayMotivation
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This botnet is comprised of 4959 accounts created between January 7th and January 28th, 2016 (with a mid-month break). All of them follow between 35 and 40 accounts, and have never liked a tweet. Account names consist of English first names followed by four random letters.
This network only uses 23 unique profile pictures (22 photos and the default pic) across 4959 accounts, resulting in each non-default pic appearing on over 200 accounts. Reverse image searches indicate that the same images may have been used for spam networks on Facebook as well.
Many of the accounts in this botnet have no tweets. 1457 of them do, all from 2016 and (allegedly) sent via Twitter Web Client. All but 59 of their 151649 tweets are repetitive invitations to contact various users on the messaging app Kik.
Who does this botnet follow? It's mostly a mix of big accounts (@BarackObama, @ESPN, @KimKardashian, etc) and Kansas-focused accounts, generally local news and sports (@KAKEnews, @KWCH12, @GoShockers, etc).
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