Sometimes one wakes up on a Thursday morning to find that one has been helpfully followed by a posse of pornbots seeking oddly specific numbers of retweets. #ThursdayMotivation #SpamtasticSolicitations
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This pornbot network consists of at least 3209 accounts created between October 2019 and May 2020. The vast majority have April 2020 birthdays, which is also when the botnet kicked into high gear, presently producing around 3000 tweets per day.
This botnet tweets 24/7 via the Twitter Web App, with spikes in the early morning and early afternoon Pacific Time. Although tweets sent via the Twitter Web App are generally organic, the fact that NONE of the 3209 accounts has ever used any of the smartphone apps is a red flag.
The majority of the text content produced by this botnet appears to be automatically generated based on templates. For example, most of their profile biographies follow the format shown here; the tweets are assembled in a similar manner.
It will come as no surprise to anyone that's been paying attention to learn that these pornbots use purloined pics; we had no difficulty finding every photo we checked on multiple reverse image search engines.
This botnet also repeats pics across accounts, at least occasionally. 269 of 3209 accounts (8.4%) use the same profile pic as another account in the network, and 30122 of the 86724 photos (34.7%) they've tweeted are repeats.
