John Scott-Railton Profile picture
May 26, 2023 12 tweets 7 min read Read on X
Been seeing these replies everywhere?

It's happening because Musk can't stop bots.

Let me break it down what's going on with this spam. 1./ Image
2/ Reply spammers fight a cat & mouse games with platforms like #Twitter.

One way they get spotted is by the platforms examining links.

If spammers hammer a platform by sending the same link in a thousands replies to the same scam site, it's not hard to spot & scale blocking. Image
3/ Remember spam emails w/misspellings, weird names, blocks of garbage text, mixtures of words & numbers etc?

These were all tactics to avoid spam filtering done by looking at each of these things for patterns.

Each new filtering strategy = new workarounds. ImageImageImage
4/ These incessant Twitter replies are doing the equivalent of old school email scammers.

They want targets to get curious & greedy like "oh cool look here's a website with an account that already has a balance...let me just log in & get rich!"

Who falls for this? Well... Image
5/ People greedily typing in the site URL & "logging in" see a big account balance!

1.5 million dollars in USDT

They are instantly rich!

But to get it out? Well looks like you'll need to talk to the scammers.

& maybe sign up for the "VIP plan" ImageImageImage
6/ Here's the thing. Platforms don't just look at the text & links of posts for evidence of spamming.

(Reports help too)

They scrutinize things like IP addresses & tech used for account creation & posting.

Enough signals of badness & you can scale up blocking.
7/ Speculation: anti-bot filtering that should happen before anyone can create an account or post... is failing.

So spam accounts are posting like crazy.

Then avoiding #Twitter's secondary defenses (e.g. text & URL filters) by mucking up their URLs to be less blatant. ImageImageImage
8./ Reply spam is a numbers game.

Hope some users see a reply. (e.g. 14 views on a 60k tweet ain't great but...)

Eventually you get one user ready to go the whole way & get conned.

Even if 99.99999999% of us don't, there's still potential for ROI. Image
9/ Now, here's the thing. You have seen this reply spam for a while because the network has been up before.

Then #Twitter did some mass suspensions.

But the spammers figured out how to circumvent #Twitter.

Great thread on the last go-round👇👇
10/ Still with me this far down the reply #spam rabbit hole?

Here's an interview with a crypto spam scammer by @briankrebs.

Thanks @oxleyio for flagging!
krebsonsecurity.com/2023/05/interv…
11/ Reply scam is like opportunistic infections.

They proliferate when an immune system isn't working.

Just like #Twitter's anti-bot tech.
12/ Just *so many signals* #Twitter could use to stomp reply spam bot accounts.

Them just constantly showing up in our replies is the daily reminder of just how bad things are. Image

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More from @jsrailton

Sep 2
NEW: foreign mercenary spyware is coming to the US.

ICE just quietly unsuspended contract with spyware maker #Paragon.

Remember them?

Caught earlier this year being used to hack journalists.

Bad move for Americans rights, national security & counterintelligence 1/Image
2/ #Paragon was co-founded in Israel in 2019 by ex head of Israel's NSA equivalent (Unit 8200) w/ major backing from former Israeli PM Ehud Barak.

Pitched themselves as stealthy & abuse-proof alternative to NSO Group's Pegasus.

& have been trying to get into the US market for years.Image
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3/For a long time all we knew about Paragon was their performance as a 'virtuous' spyware company with values.

All that came to a crashing halt in 2025 when they got very caught, helping customers hack targets across @WhatsApp.

WhatsApp did the right thing & notified users.

By @razhael
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Read 18 tweets
Aug 29
NEW: @WhatsApp caught & fixed a sophisticated zero click attack...

Now they've published an advisory about it.

Say attackers combined the exploit with an @Apple vulnerability to hack a specific group of targets (i.e. this wasn't pointed at everybody)

Quick thoughts 1/Image
Wait, you say, haven't I heard of @WhatsApp zero-click exploits before?

You have.

A big user base makes a platform big target for exploit development.

Think about it from the attacker's perspective: an exploit against a popular messenger gives you potential access to a lot of devices.

You probably want maximum mileage from that painstakingly developed, weaponized, and tested exploit code you created/ purchased (or got bundled into your Pegasus subscription).
3/ The regular tempo of large platforms catching sophisticated exploits is a good sign.

They're paying attention & devoting resources to this growing category of highly targeted, sophisticated attacks.

But it's also a reminder of the magnitude of the threat out there...

whatsapp.com/security/advis…
Read 4 tweets
Aug 20
WHOA: megapublisher @axelspringer is asking a German court to ban an ad-blocker.

Their claim that should make everyone nervous:

The HTML/ CSS code of websites are protected computer programs.

And influencing they are displayed (e.g by removing ads) violates copyright.

1/Image
2/ Preventing ad-blocking would be a huge blow to German cybersecurity and privacy.

There are critical security & privacy reasons to influence how a websites code gets displayed.

Like stripping out dangerous code & malvertising.

Or blocking unwanted trackers.

This is why most governments do it on their systems.Image
3/Defining HTML/CSS as a protected computer program will quickly lead to absurdities touching every corner of the internet.

Just think of the potential infringements:

-Screen readers for the blind
-'Dark mode' bowser extensions
-Displaying snippets of code in a university class
-Inspecting & modifying code in your own browser
-Website translators
Read 7 tweets
Jul 10
NEW: Mexico's former president under investigation for taking bribes from spyware industry.

Contracts included #Pegasus deal.

Story from @TheRecord_Media's Suzanne Smalley 1/Image
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2/ Mexico's former president is denying everything...

But folks may recall that Pegasus was massively and systematically abused in Mexico.

Against journalists, spouses of cartel victims, lawyers, families of cartel-disappeared people, anti-corruption groups etc. etc.

There were so many cases that we eventually had EIGHT investigative reports...
therecord.media/former-mexican…Image
3/ What still gives me chills is how many cases surfaced of people killed by cartels... or their family members... getting targeted with Pegasus spyware.

The #PegasusProject found even more potential cases in Mexico. Image
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Read 5 tweets
Jun 18
🚨NEW REPORT: exposing a new hacking tactic.

🇷🇺Russian state-backed hackers used an App-Specific Password attack against prominent Russia expert @KeirGiles & others.

It's like they know what we all expect from them...and then did the opposite 1/

By us @citizenlab & @google's GTIGImage
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2/ Let's begin: @KeirGiles gets a message purporting to be from @StateDept asking for a consultation.

The attackers send the message from a @gmail, but CC'd a bunch of email addresses @ state.gov.

Strong credibility signal to have a bunch of gov ppl on the CC line right?

Well, what the attackers were counting on is that the State Dept mailserver just accepts all email addresses without emitting a bounce.

So they seem to have just created some fake State Dept staff names and addresses.Image
3/ The attackers wait for the 2nd interaction to introduce the pivotal deception: getting @KeirGiles to 'connect to a secure platform.'

In the next days they patiently walk him through what they want him to do, even sending a very official looking (but fake) State Dept. documentImage
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Read 10 tweets
Jun 12
🚨NEW INVESTIGATION: We just forensically unmasked #Paragon's Apple spyware.

Zero-click targets: Journalists. In 🇪🇺Europe.

Like 🇮🇹Italian reporter @ciropellegrino.

Reopen's #Italy's spyware scandal.

Follows our @citizenlab investigation of their Android spyware. 1/ Image
2/ Back in April, @Apple sent out a threat notification to a select group of users. Some got in touch with us @citizenlab to get analyzed.

They'd been targeted with a sophisticated zero-click attack (think: no click, no attachment to open, no mistake needed...).Image
3/ While my brilliant colleague @billmarczak was working on the phone of a prominent European journalist, he made a smoking gun discovery:

Requests to server matching our P1 fingerprint for #Paragon's graphite.

Paragon's 'undetectable' Apple spyware had just been found...Image
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Read 13 tweets

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