Oh look, supplements. Also bots. Bots promoting supplements, even. (No, this is not a thread about Alex Jones.) #MondayMotivation #Spamtastic
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
We found 63 IFTTT bots tweeting Arabic coupon spam, mostly for discounts on nutritional supplements on iherb(dot)com. Almost all were created in batches of accounts with similar names, and userpics are reused across accounts.
As tends to be the case with spam, these bots are repetitive, with many tweets having been repeated verbatim thousands of times. No tweet thus far has been tweeted by all 63 accounts, however.
This botnet has ramped up its output recently; it had been peaking at ~30 tweets per hour for most of April and is now up to 60. It looks like the operators occasionally augment the output manually via Android phones; the tweet content is similar to the automated tweets.
(We found this botnet in the same IFTTT search that also unearthed various pornbot networks. We also noticed a few other Arabic #couponspam bots that we didn't include in this thread because we weren't 100% sure they were related.)
