Symantec's Satnam Narang has discovered a scammer who managed to create and operate 750.000 Twitter accounts on his own.
The security researcher who discovered one man show spam managed to earn cash from advertisements and referrals to other websites.
Narang said he was the only scammer to impersonate news agencies and celebrities over the past year, promoting a fake weight loss product.
“One of the most interesting aspects of it modes spam are account retention and recovery techniques in order to avoid Anti-Spam measures, Narang states in his research: Uncovering persistent dietary spam operation on ΤWitter (pdf).
"Since the beginning of 2014, an individual has been running a huge spam operation on Twitter for over a year using about 750.000 fake accounts on Twitter. Twitter. "
Narang did not name the scammer, but said he had registered some accounts under his real name and through them, using a well-known Twitter bot, made the retweets.
This scam consists of three types of accounts that mimicked major brands. They used stolen tweets and avatars, and were full of fake fans - or mockingbirds, parrots and eggs according to Symantec terminology.
Big media informationς όπως το TMZ, το MTV, το Yahoo! και το Beeb ήταν μερικοί από τους Mockingbird λογαριασμούς, ενώ παράλληλα υπήρχαν δεκάδες διασημότητες και τυχαίες φωτογραφίες με ελκυστικές Women σε λογαριασμούς παπαγάλων (parrots) σε μια προσπάθεια απόκτησης πραγματικών followers από τον απατεώνα. Όπως επισημαίνει η Symantec το φαινόμενο λογαριασμών spam που χρησιμοποιούν φωτογραφιές ελκυστικών γυναικών είναι πολύ old but unfortunately it still works.
