As it turns out, the @BlockchainCutie account amplified by the botnet described in this previous thread has a bunch of fake followers. We took a closer look at the largest network following it.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1369031479548911616
3117 of @BlockchainCutie's followers are batch-created accounts created in late 2020 that we believe to be part of a single botnet. To find the rest of the botnet, we explored the followers of the other accounts these 3117 bots follow.
This botnet consists of 9640 accounts, created in batches between October 15th and December 18th 2020. All of these accounts tweet exclusively via the Twitter Web App - no tweets sent via Android or iPhone, which is itself anomalous.
https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1362208978986553347
These accounts mostly tweet (and retweet, reply, and quote tweet) in both Vietnamese and English. The tweets with an "unknown" language are mostly short tweets consisting entirely of hashtags and cryptocurrency names.
Who does this botnet amplify via retweets, quote tweets, and replies? Mostly cryptocurrency/blockchain accounts, although a few musicians, political accounts, and @ElonMusk also turn up. The set of accounts they follow is similar to the accounts they amplify.
This network's original tweets and replies are quite repetitive. The repeated tweets are a mix of short cryptocurrency tweets (some are quote tweets) and sayings and quotes in English and Vietnamese. Amusingly, some of the repeated tweets have a portion of the first word cut off.
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