Porn Spam Botnet Has Evil Twitter Twin

Last month KrebsOnSecurity published research into a large distributed network of apparently compromised systems being used to relay huge blasts of junk email promoting “online dating” programs — affiliate-driven schemes traditionally overrun with automated accounts posing as women. New research suggests that another bot-promoting botnet of more than 80,000 automated female Twitter accounts has been pimping the same dating scheme and ginning up millions of clicks from Twitter users in the process. Continue reading Porn Spam Botnet Has Evil Twitter Twin

Porn Spam Botnet Has Evil Twitter Twin

Last month KrebsOnSecurity published research into a large distributed network of apparently compromised systems being used to relay huge blasts of junk email promoting “online dating” programs — affiliate-driven schemes traditionally overrun with automated accounts posing as women. New research suggests that another bot-promoting botnet of more than 80,000 automated female Twitter accounts has been pimping the same dating scheme and ginning up millions of clicks from Twitter users in the process. Continue reading Porn Spam Botnet Has Evil Twitter Twin

Inside a Porn-Pimping Spam Botnet

For several months I’ve been poking at a decent-sized spam botnet that appears to be used mainly for promoting adult dating sites. Having hit a wall in my research, I decided it might be good to publish what I’ve unearthed so far to see if this dovetails with any other research out there.

In late October 2016, an anonymous source shared with KrebsOnSecurity.com a list of nearly 100 URLs that — when loaded into a Firefox browser — each displayed what appeared to be a crude but otherwise effective “counter” designed to report in real time how many “bots” were reporting in for duty.

Here’s a set of archived screenshots of those counters illustrating how these various botnet controllers keep a running tab of how many “activebots” — hacked servers set up to relay spam — are sitting idly by and waiting for instructions. Continue reading Inside a Porn-Pimping Spam Botnet