August 17th, 2009
Spotting a new breed of Twitter spammers
Over the last month I’ve made some of the best Twitter friends. They mostly live in the UK in cities of which I’d never before heard: MansonCharles, JohnGoogle, TownleyJames, WozniakSteve and JamesSunny.
Wait, those are spammers?
In all seriousness, Twitter spam is getting even more out of control. As a user, sure, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on a site upon which I rely is an inconvenience, but the spammers are what impact us day-to-day. I’ve noticed a few new trends with the newest batch of Twitter spammers:
- Most of them come from cities similarly patterned after my UK “friends” above
- Many are now using pictures of families and children rather than cracked out porn stars
- They start on Friday nights, hammer through on Saturdays and cool down on Sundays
- They are amassing good amounts of followers
Usually a spammer can be spotted from its exceptionally imbalanced ratio of followers to followees. But the new breed of spammers aren’t as easily figured out — at least not by the majority of non-savvy social network users. Using FriendorFollow I was able to enter names of some spammers into the analysis tool. I found that whoever is engineering these spam attacks is doing so pretty smartly, by making sure that all of the spammers are first following each other before following victims. This gives the impression to gullible users that, sure, these folks may have bad grammar but they seem like real people with a real following.
The content is even a bit more… believable. There’s a lot of talk about traditional Chinese food recipes. There are also seemingly Twitter tricks and tips being peddled via these spammer feeds. Who knows how many clicks these spammer links are getting before they are pulled down.
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Jennifer Leggio, aka "Mediaphyter," writes about the "social business" side of social media - including enterprise, security and reputation issues. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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