A massive attack of ‘sexual botnet’ hit hard on the microblogging Twitter service, discovered the security company ZeroFOX Threat Research. The firm, which has been investigating a Twitter spam botnet called SIREN since February, found that more than 8.5 million messages from nearly 90,000 fake accounts with links to online dating, dating, and porn sites had sent spam to Twitter users.
“Previously discovered botnets of this magnitude showed benign goals such as generating Star Wars quotes in mass, however SIREN is in clear violation of the Twitter Terms of Service,” the research group wrote in a blog this week.
The researchers had informed Twitter about their findings, after which the social media network removed false accounts.
According to reports, the ‘sexual botnet’ generated more than 30 million clicks on Twitter, causing people to share their bank details on promoted websites. “Accounts are directly committed to an objective by citing one of their tweets or by bringing targets to the visible load in their bio profile or tweet set,” said ZeroFOX. “As far as we know, the botnet is one of the biggest malicious campaigns ever recorded on a social network.”
