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Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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6 Mar, 5 tweets, 4 min read
It's a great day to look at a small botnet that retweets Spanish followback hashtag #SigueMeYTeSigo. #FridayFeeling

cc: @ZellaQuixote
This botnet consists of 13 accounts created between 2017 and 2020. Each account is active 24/7 and ends most of its tweets via a unique custom app, most of which have names like "dfghji876". Judging by their follower/following ratios, the bots don't actually follow back.
The vast majority of this botnet's content (99.4% of recent tweets) consists of retweets of tweets containing #SigueMeYTeSigo (or stylized variants such as #𝙎𝙞𝙜𝙪𝙚𝙢𝙚𝙔𝙏𝙚𝙎𝙞𝙜𝙤 and #𝕊𝕀𝔾𝕌𝔼𝕄𝔼𝕐𝕋𝔼𝕊𝕀𝔾𝕆) sent via the custom apps mentioned earlier in this thread.
Six of the accounts in this botnet also post very occasional tweets via popular automation services dlvr(dot)it and IFTTT rather than custom apps. These tweets contain links to news articles and blog posts.
For science, we enlisted @DrunkAlexJones to empirically test this botnet's retweet behavior. Thus far, two of the bots (@SandraFlamencoS and @CarlosMoralesSv) have taken the bait, but neither has followed back.

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
5 Mar
We've looked at a variety of Twitter accounts being sold on dodgy sites, but @Online_agine holds the record for most followers with a whopping 712056.

(content warning: every single account described in this thread pretty much tweets nothing but porn videos)

cc: @ZellaQuixote
Although porn account @Online_agine has been around since December 2009, its massive follower growth does not appear to have started until September 2020. (A dataset we captured in March 2020 in which it showed up confirms that it only had 34 followers at that point.)
As it turns out, @Online_agine (permanent ID 97295448) wasn't always named @Online_agine. It appears to have been originally named @Allanymsantos, which was changed to @Mayaunmoor sometime prior to its massive follower growth, and then finally to its current name.
Read 10 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
3 Mar
What's up with these identical tweets sent via TweetDeck?

(Note: duplicate tweets embedding YouTube videos are sometimes the result of the title of the YouTube video being copied into the tweet text, but that's not the case here.)

cc: @ZellaQuixote Image
Answer: the duplicate TweetDeck tweets are the work of a Spanish-language botnet, consisting of 10 accounts created in 11 minutes on August 22nd, 2020. All ten accounts have virtually identical schedules. ImageImage
At present, all of these accounts tweet exclusively via TweetDeck, although prior to mid-January they also used Twitter for Android. While they could be human-operated given the software used, we suspect automation due to the identical schedules (and repetition, as we'll see). Image
Read 5 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
2 Mar
What's up with all these accounts created in May 2012 with "legit check" as their pinned tweet? #SeemsLegit

cc: @ZellaQuixote
Answer: they're part of a botnet that retweets and replies to giveaway tweets. This network consists of 271 accounts created on May 1st, 2012 that have no tweets prior to December 2020. (Not all have the "legit check" pinned tweet, but they have other things in common...)
At present, the 271 accounts in this network all (allegedly) tweet via the Twitter Web App. They've gone through a variety of custom apps, however, many of which seem to be named to give the incorrect impression that they are official Twitter products ("Tɯitter for Samsung" etc).
Read 7 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
27 Feb
We started looking at who the accounts in the astroturf network documented in this thread from Feb 9th follow, and discovered a whole bunch more accounts that we believe to be part of the network. #SaturdayShenaniGANs

cc: @ZellaQuixote
We found 64848 accounts that we believe to be part of the network (although we may still have missed some). With rare exceptions, they have few tweets and follow far more accounts than they have followers. They're mostly older accounts, almost all created 2018 or earlier.
Who do the accounts in this network follow? It's an eclectic mix that includes government officials from multiple countries, tech entrepreneurs, cryptocurrency accounts, and a "coronavirus news" account, among others.
Read 11 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
25 Feb
Despite having tweeted #FollowMeJP daily for almost a decade (via automation tool twittbot(dot)net), none of these accounts has managed to pick up more than 100 followers. #WednesdayWisdom

cc: @ZellaQuixote
These accounts are part of a botnet consisting of 125 Japanese-language accounts created on December 11th and 12th, 2011. Each account name consists of a lowercase English word with one or two random characters added to both the beginning and the end of the name.
These accounts behave in an extremely predictable fashion, posting exactly one tweet per day, resulting in 125 total tweets per day from the network (with rare exceptions). All tweets are sent via automation service twittbot(dot)net, and all 125 bots have default profile pics.
Read 5 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
24 Feb
In an interesting twist, @TwitterSafety's latest takedown announcement was greeted with a barrage of replies and quote tweets containing the hashtag #ArmenianGovernmentTrolls (and frequently no other text).

cc: @ZellaQuixote
We downloaded tweets (excluding retweets) containing #ArmenianGovernmentTrolls, yielding 310 tweets from 204 accounts. The hashtag appears to have been started today by @FasliNabiyev shortly after @TwitterSafety's announcement.
The accounts tweeting #ArmenianGovernmentTrolls are disproportionately new accounts, with more than half of them having been created in July 2020 or later. 184 of 204 are accounts that previously spammed another hashtag we studied, #DontBelieveArmenia.
Read 6 tweets

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