We took a closer look at this Arabic-language fake engagement botnet that we found promoting blue-check shady social media services vendor @sendthetrend. It consists of more accounts than we originally noticed (240 accounts rather than 188).
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1308191669578235910
The 240 accounts in this botnet were created in batches between November 28th, 2016 and January 5th, 2017, with the majority created on January 5th, 2017. Almost all of their tweets are retweets (99.5%) and almost all were sent via Mobile Web (M2) (99.9%).
These accounts retweet a variety of Arabic-language accounts, with the most frequent flier being @dk_alsabah. Since we don't speak Arabic (and don't trust the accuracy of machine translation tools), we're unsure if there's a theme to the accounts/content amplified.
As with the accounts retweeted by the bots in this network, the accounts they follow are mostly Arabic-language accounts. Some aren't, however, and there's a bit of a twist. . .
Although the accounts in this botnet mostly follow Arabic-language accounts, the first ~20 accounts followed by many of the bots have different primary languages (usually English or Russian). We don't have a good explanation for this, and are interested in theories/speculation.
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