It's October 1st, which is as good a day as any to look at yet another fake follower botnet. This network consists of (at least) 95848 accounts created between December 25th, 2016 and December 31st, 2017.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The accounts in this botnet have much in common. All have account names consisting of random lowercase letters followed by 1-4 digits, Japanese display names, few or no followers, few or no likes, and tweet(ed) exclusively via the Twitter Web Client. Most tweets are in Japanese.
How did we find the set of accounts in the network? We noticed ~20000 of them following @Arslan_Sadiq, and mapped out the rest of the botnet by checking the followers of the other accounts they followed for additional accounts that fit the pattern.
Most of the accounts followed by this botnet are Japanese-language accounts, although a few English-language accounts with large followings turn up as well, including @realDonaldTrump, @katyperry, and @CNN.
In addition to following accounts en masse, this botnet also posts original tweets and retweets. The original tweets are almost all in Japanese and many are repeated across accounts. As always, take the Google translations with a large grain of salt.
The accounts retweeted by this botnet are pretty much all Japanese-language accounts. As is often the case with tweets that have been astroturfed, many of the tweets they amplify have garnered far more retweets than likes.
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