Twitter faces massive ‘sex botnet’ spam, deletes fake accounts

A massive ‘sex botnet’ attack had hit hard the micro-blogging service Twitter, discovered security firm ZeroFOX Threat Research. The firm, which has been investigating a spam porgraphy botnet on Twitter named SIREN since February, found that over 8.5 million posts from nearly 90,000 fake accounts with links to online romance, dating and porn website had spammed Twitter users.

“Previously discovered botnets of this magnitude displayed benign end goals such as generating Star Wars quotes en masse, however SIREN is in clear violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service,” wrote the research group in a blog post this week.

The researchers had informed Twitter about their findings, following which the social media network deleted fake accounts.

According to reports, the ‘sex botnet’ generated over 30 millions clicks on Twitter, making people share their banking details on the promoted websites. “The accounts either engage directly with a target by quoting one of their tweets or attracting targets to the payload visible on their profile bio or pinned tweet,” ZeroFOX said. “To our knowledge, the botnet is one of the largest malicious campaigns ever recorded on a social network.”