It's still a holiday weekend, so let's look at a not-even-remotely dormant botnet that repeatedly cloned our thread on a mostly-dormant botnet that follows YouTube political commentator @Timcast. #MondayMotivation
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The four accounts that copied our thread (@bbcwaleshistory, @center_4_sight, @DenverNews4, and @DevidJohnson5) all used an app called "RSS Masher - Dev". What does it do?
We didn't find a way to try the RSS Masher Twitter app for free, but it would appear that RSS Masher is a tool for folks who want to thrive in content marketing by automatically populating their blogs and news sites with plagiarized content.
We looked at the bots that cloned our thread, and one of them (@bbcwaleshistory) indeed has a blog linked from its profile that appears to consist of content copied from other blogs. How many Twitter accounts are using the RSS Masher app?
We found a total of 216 accounts tweeting via "RSS Masher - Dev", 194 of which send at least 80% of their tweets via automated means and 119 of which are fully automated. Some of them pair the RSS Masher app with other automation tools such as IFTTT.
Although many of the accounts using "RSS Masher - Dev" have been around for a while, traffic has only taken off in the last week or so. (A few individual accounts are exceptions and have significant tweet volume prior to the date range shown.)
Although RSS Masher is advertised as a product anyone can use, the majority of the Twitter accounts using the RSS Masher App amplify one another and are likely part of a single operation. Some also retweet @GuerinGreen, @CherryCreekNews, and accounts retweeted by those accounts.
In addition to retweeting each other, the RSS Masher accounts also link to various websites, many with names matching the accounts (i.e. @hellofaread links hellofaread(dot)com and so on.) Several of the sites have identical Terms & Conditions sections.
Unsurprisingly, most of the websites linked by these bots consist of plagiarized content, much of it from The Sun. Also, despite the name, covidnineteen(dot)wiki is not in fact a wiki; it's just another feed of copied new articles and blog posts.
