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5 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
While exploring tweet cloners, we detected an anomaly in a high follower account's followers @EddieDonovan.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
We found 145 bots created in June 2017, all with the following properties:
- randomized 5-7 character account names
- Arabic display names
- 1000-1300ish tweets, almost all in Arabic (166659 of 166675, 99.99%)
- randomized 5-7 character account names
- Arabic display names
- 1000-1300ish tweets, almost all in Arabic (166659 of 166675, 99.99%)
These 145 bots have been largely dormant for the last few months, but when active they tweeted 24/7. All use the same set of apps to tweet - occasional use of the website, but most tweets were posted via "athkarApp" or "تطبيــق دعـــاء".
Do these 145 bots repeat tweets? Oh yes they do - both within and across accounts. Most tweets have been tweeted at least once by each account, and several were repeated more frequently.
What's the purpose of this botnet? We're not sure at this point (in part due to the language barrier,) but have included machine-translated examples of the accounts' content to give a sense of what they look like.
