Do you want to "Get More Twitter Followers Now" and possibly have your account transformed into a spambot in the process? You probably don't, so DON'T CLICK THE LINKS in tweets (or DMs) like this. #FridayFeeling
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The links in the "Get More Twitter Followers Now" tweets appear to lead to Chinese web portal sogou(dot)com, but in reality they redirect to various sketchy follower gain sites that quickly bring up a prompt requesting total control of your Twitter account.
We found 4324 accounts posting follower gain spam with links to dodgy sites via sogou(dot)com in the past week. Nearly all the followspam tweets are automated via a wide variety of custom apps, and the accounts tweeting them are disproportionately recent creations.
We pulled the most recent 3200 tweets for each of the accounts tweeting the "Get More Twitter Followers Now" spam tweets (most have far fewer tweets.) Although some of the accounts seem to be bots solely focused on pushing the spam, most have organic-looking tweets as well.
111 of the accounts tweeting the "Get More Twitter Followers Now" spam are completely automated. These could be bots set up by the people behind the op, or they could be hijacked accounts of folks who were duped into clicking the links.
One more interesting detail: the majority (84.9%) of the spam tweets were processed by the same datacenter, while other (potentially organic) tweets from the same accounts are pretty evenly split between two datacenters, possibly indicating a difference in location of origin.
(previous threads where we've used the datacenter ID as a forensic data point)
(old thread on a similar "free followers and likes" spam phenomenon that surfaced during one of the Democratic presidential debates)
Update: @DrunkAlexJones followed a bunch of the accounts tweeting the "Get More Twitter Followers Now" spam, and today his DMs are flooded with what look like Instagram links but are in reality opportunities to have one's account hijacked and incorporated into the spam network.
Unsurprisingly, the accounts sending the DMs have also been tweeting the follower spam links, mostly via an app called "Panoramic moTweets". Once again, DON'T CLICK THE LINKS in these tweets or DMs.
