Nearly 9. 0,0. 00 Sex Bots Invaded Twitter in 'One of the Largest Malicious Campaigns Ever Recorded on a Social Network'Last week, Twitter’s security team purged nearly 9. The accounts had already generated more than 8. The bullshit accounts were first identified by Zero. FOX, a Baltimore- based security firm that specializes in social- media threat detection. The researchers dubbed the botnet “SIREN” after sea- nymphs described in Greek mythology as half- bird half- woman creatures whose sweet songs often lured horny, drunken sailors to their rocky deaths. Zero. FOX’s research into SIREN offers a rare glimpse into how efficient scammers have become at bypassing Twitter’s anti- spam techniques. Watch Starship: Rising Online Mic.

Watch breaking news videos, viral videos and original video clips on CNN.com. E! Online - Your source for entertainment news, celebrities, celeb news, and celebrity gossip. Check out the hottest fashion, photos, movies and TV shows! Last week, Twitter’s security team purged nearly 90,000 fake accounts after outside researchers discovered a massive botnet peddling links to fake “dating” and. Back in July, the German website for Volvo slipped and accidentally released a partial image of the 2018 Volvo XC40. Today, thanks to another leak, we now have a full.

Further, it demonstrates how effective these types of botnets can be: The since- deleted accounts collectively generated upwards of 3. Google’s URL shortening service. The 9. 0,0. 00 accounts were all created using roughly the same formula: A profile picture of a stereotypically attractive young woman whose tweets included sexually suggestive, if not poorly written remarks that invite users to “meet” with them for a “sex chat.” Millions of users apparently fell for the ruse and, presumably, a small fraction of went on to provide their payment card information to the pornographic websites they were lured to.“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,” Zero. Watch Mercy Online. FOX reports. Roughly 2. Twitter’s anti- spam detection. Here’s just a brief sample of the hilariously bad tweets generated by these obviously fake accounts: “I want to #fondle me?”“I want to take my #virgin?”“Came home from training, tired wildly?”“Meow, I want to have sex.”“Boys like you, my figure?”“Want a vulgar, young man?”The tweets further included links to affiliate programs—web pages that typically redirect users to other adult websites. Members of these programs, which traditionally rely heavily on spam, receive payouts based on the amount of traffic they send to subscription- based porn and so- called “adult dating” websites.

Likewise, many of the “dating” websites are themselves scams, chiefly comprised of fake female profiles which encourage visitors to sign up for paid subscriptions with promises of lame cybersex and nudes. PSA: There are literally no women on the internet that want to have sex with you.)According to Zero. FOX, two out of five of the domains tweeted by the SIREN botnet are associated with a company called Deniro Marketing. Deniro Marketing was identified earlier this year by noted security researcher Brian Krebs as being tied to a “porn- pimping spam botnet.” (Krebs also filed a report Monday regarding Zero. FOX’s discovery.) The company reportedly settled a lawsuit in 2.

A noisy cheer went up from the crowd of hackers clustered around the voting machine tucked into the back corner of a casino conference room—they’d just managed to.

A Deniro Marketing employee who answered the phone at its California headquarters on Monday said that no one was available to respond to inquiries from reporters. While it seems unlikely that Deniro Marketing created the fake accounts itself, it may have contracted a third party—likely located somewhere in Russia or Eastern Europe—to spread the links for them. A “large chunk” of the accounts’ self- declared languages were Russian, Zero. FOX reports, and approximately 1. Cyrillic alphabet.“To our knowledge, the botnet is one of the largest malicious campaigns ever recorded on a social network,” Zero. Fox concludes. Luckily, none of the links tweeted by the SIREN botnet appear to contain malware, nor were any associated with phishing attempts. But with more than 3.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.[Zero.