Nearly 90,000 Sex Bots Invade Twitter In Huge Adult Dating & Porn Spam Campaign

Twitter’s security team deleted nearly 90,000 fake accounts last week that were linked to a botnet campaign advertising fake adult dating and pornography services online.

The spam campaign was first spotted by digital security company ZeroFOX, who looked into the massive pornography botnet that was targeting the social media network.

As explained by ZeroFOX, a botnet is a collection of bot accounts controlled by a central command.

They found over 90,000 fake accounts that used a woman’s name and featured a suggestive photo, and nearly always included a sexually explicit phrase or poorly written remarks.

This was designed to encourage users to click on their tweets, which used Google’s URL shortening service to take them through a series of redirects before finally landing on a website that encouraged them to sign up for subscription pornography, webcam or fake dating websites.

And according to ZeroFOX, millions of people fell for the scam, the campaign generating over 30m clicks, with some falling victim by entering their payment information.

The digital security company disclosed all the Twitter profiles and posts to Twitter’s security team on 10th July, who subsequently removed them all from the platform.

In a blog post, ZeroFOX said: “To our knowledge, the botnet is one of the largest malicious campaigns ever recorded on a social network.”

To read an in-depth account of the spam campaign, check out ZeroFOX’s blog post here.