[Infowarrior] - Twitter Bots Drown Out Anti-Kremlin Tweets

[Richard Forno]

(c/o jh)

Twitter Bots Drown Out Anti-Kremlin Tweets

Thousands of Twitter accounts apparently created in advance to blast
automated messages are being used to drown out Tweets sent by bloggers
and activists this week who are protesting the disputed parliamentary
elections in Russia, security experts said.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/12/twitter-bots-drown-out-anti-kremlin-tweets/

Amid widespread reports of ballot stuffing and voting irregularities
in the election, thousands of Russians have turned out in the streets
to protest. Russian police arrested hundreds of protesters who had
gathered in Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square, including notable
anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny. In response, protesters began
tweeting their disgust in a Twitter hashtag #триумфальная
(Triumfalnaya), which quickly became one of the most-tweeted hashtags
on Twitter.

But according to several experts, it wasn’t long before messages sent
to that hashtag were drowned out by pro-Kremlin tweets that appear to
have been sent by countless Twitter bots. Maxim Goncharov, a senior
threat researcher at Trend Micro, observed that “if you currently
check this hash tag on twitter you’ll see a flood of 5-7 identical
tweets from accounts that have been inactive for month and that only
had 10-20 tweets before this day. To this point those hacked accounts
have already posted 10-20 more tweets in just one hour.”

“Whether the attack was supported officially or not is not relevant,
but we can now see how social media has become the battlefield of a
new war for freedom of speech,” Goncharov wrote.

I’ve been working with a few security researchers inside of Russia who
asked not to be named for fear of retribution by patriotic Russian
hackers or the government. Since Trend’s posting, they’ve identified
thousands of additional accounts (e.g., @ALanskoy, @APoluyan,
@AUstickiy, @AbbotRama, @AbrahamCaldwell…a much longer list is
available here) that are rapidly posting anti-protester or pro-Kremlin
sentiments to more than a dozen hashtags and keywords that protesters
are using to share news, including #Navalny.

A review of the 2,000 Twitter accounts linked above indicates that
most of them were created at the beginning of July 2011, and have very
few tweets other than those meant to counter the protesters, or to
simply fill the hashtag feeds with meaningless garbage. Some of the
bot messages include completely unrelated hashtags or keywords,
seemingly to pollute the news stream for the protester hashtags.

In addition, almost all of the bot accounts are mostly following each
other, with a handful of exceptions:  It appears that most of the
auto-created accounts that are flooding the protester hashtags are
following the Twitter account @master_boot, which looks like it
belongs to an actual user. In fact, one of Master_boot’s 17,000+
followers recently tweeted to inquire about Twitter bots. The person
behind the @master_boot account did not immediately respond to
requests.

Interestingly, the Kremlin leadership appears to be using their
Twitter accounts to bash those calling the recent elections a fraud.
Reuters is reporting that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev caused
shock and jeers on Wednesday after an obscene insult directed at
political opponents appeared on his official Twitter feed. According
to cached copies of the feed and a notification of the post received
by a Reuters reporter, Medvedev’s tweet read:

“It has become clear that if a person writes the expression ‘party of
swindlers and thieves’ in their blog then they are a stupid sheep
getting f****d in the mouth :) .”


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