Social media voting has begun for the 2020 #iHeartAwards, and somebody's already put an automated thumb on the proverbial scale. What's up with those daily surges of IFTTT traffic?
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@ZellaQuixote Answer: an IFTTT botnet is spamming "#iHeartAwards #Thotiana #BestRemix" to the tune of 145810 tweets from 1030 automated accounts since social media voting opened on January 8th. No other entry appears be experiencing automated voting on anything approaching this scale.
@ZellaQuixote To give you a sense of what this network's tweets actually look like, here's 30 seconds or so worth of scrolling through their tweets.
Search phrase that (at least for now) brings up these bots:
#iHeartAwards #Thotiana #BestRemix source:IFTTT
Search phrase that (at least for now) brings up these bots:
#iHeartAwards #Thotiana #BestRemix source:IFTTT
@ZellaQuixote In addition to the three hashtags, each tweet starts with something like "RT xq<account name>qx" (we saw other letters in place of "xq" occasionally.) Despite the "RT" these aren't copies of tweets from the named accounts, most of which haven't tweeted about the #iHeartAwards.
@ZellaQuixote This is not this botnet's first rodeo - prior to the current #iHeartAwards binge, it has spammed at least six other sets of social media fan vote hashtags, for a total of (at least) 3318542 automated tweets. #VoteEarlyVoteOften
@ZellaQuixote Update: this botnet continues to tweet thousands of automated #iHeartAwards votes per day (the blue IFTTT spikes.) Thus far, it has cast 269345 of 421329 (63.9%) of all Twitter votes in the #BestRemix category, dwarfing actual human effort on behalf of any of the contenders.
