Giant Twitter Botnet found called StarWars (350.000 Bots)

[uzn]

Two Sientists at the London University College discovered a giant Botnet that opperates in Twitter by analysing 1 percent of the live Twitteraccounts. They found out that this Botnet is using random Locations like in the middle of an Ocean or a Mountaintop and so on, so they looked a bit closer. They found that this Botnet has at least 356.957 Bots. It has been operating at least since 2013. At the Moment the Botnet called StarWars is in an inactive state but could be activated anytime again. Juan Echeverria and Shi Zhou fond this out, here is their final publication about it:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.02405v1.pdf
http://1.f.ix.de/imgs/18/2/1/2/8/3/7/1/Schema-158da8585d0d549d.png
http://1.f.ix.de/scale/geometry/695/q75/imgs/18/2/1/2/8/3/7/1/starwaresbots-99c7f2ae83c0fee7.png

[7alon]

What does this mean?

[Clear Light]

What does this mean?

New Scientist 12th January 2017 : Army of 350,000 Star Wars bots found lurking on Twitter (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2117811-army-of-350000-star-wars-bots-found-lurking-on-twitter/)



No one knows why the botnet was set up. “One theory is bots are sold for money, they’re sold as fake followers,” says Zhou. People can pay for bots to follow them to enhance their follower account and appear more popular. But if such activity ever took place with these bots, it seems to have been short-lived.

Alternatively, someone may have set up the bots to influence trending Twitter topics, suggests Filippo Menczer at Indiana University Bloomington.

Jon Crowcroft at the University of Cambridge says the botnet may simply have been an experiment by an amateur hacker. “It’s amusing,” he says. “But it’s relatively pointless.”

[robinr1]

this would be my question also




What does this mean?

[joeecho]

We have all seen the corporate take over of physical businesses and these botnets could, among other things, be a tool in the battles going on behind the scenes by these companies. The correlation between the physical and the digital world would be a fascinating subject to explore.

[Inversion]

This sounds very similar to what Clif High talks about. He claims we all psychically leak data about the future. In the Introduction in the PDF in post one it states Twitter can be used to predict or detect events. With an average of 182 billion tweets per year it can easily be used as an artificial collective mind.

[Innocent Warrior]

this would be my question also




What does this mean?

From the report linked in the OP -


1.2 Threats of Twitter bots

Twitter bots have attracted a lot of attention [19] because they can pose serious threats to the health and security of Twitter as a popular public social and communication service.

Spamming Spammer bots can send a large amount of unsolicited content to other users. The most common objective of spam is getting users to click on advertising links with questionable value [12], or propagate computer viruses and other malware.

Fake trending topics If bots are able to pass as humans through Twitter’s filters, they would be counted by Twitter for choosing trending topics and hashtags. This would allow the bots to create fake trending topics that are not actually being popular in Twitter.

Opinion manipulation A large group of bots can misrepresent public opinion. If the bots are not detected in time, they could tweet like real users, but coordinated centrally around a specific topic. They could all post positive or negative tweets skewing metrics used by companies and researchers to track opinions on that topics.

Astroturfing attack Bots can orchestrate a campaign to create a fake sense of agreement among Twitter users [4,21], where they mask the sponsor of the message, making it seem like it originates from the community itself.

Fake Followers Fake followers can be bought or sold online [31]. After receiving payment from a user, the botmaster of a botnet can instruct its bots to follow that user. Fake followers could make a user seem more important than it is [7,9,17]. One would expect that fake followers should try to appear like real users [11,12], however people rarely verify whether someone’s followers are human or bots.

Streaming API contamination Many research works rely on analysing tweet data returned by Twitter’s streaming API. It is reported [18] that the API is susceptible to an attack by bots, where bots can time their tweets in such a way that their tweets can be included in the API with a probability higher than the expected 1%, up to as high as 82%.

[7alon]

What does this mean?

New Scientist 12th January 2017 : Army of 350,000 Star Wars bots found lurking on Twitter (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2117811-army-of-350000-star-wars-bots-found-lurking-on-twitter/)



No one knows why the botnet was set up. “One theory is bots are sold for money, they’re sold as fake followers,” says Zhou. People can pay for bots to follow them to enhance their follower account and appear more popular. But if such activity ever took place with these bots, it seems to have been short-lived.

Alternatively, someone may have set up the bots to influence trending Twitter topics, suggests Filippo Menczer at Indiana University Bloomington.

Jon Crowcroft at the University of Cambridge says the botnet may simply have been an experiment by an amateur hacker. “It’s amusing,” he says. “But it’s relatively pointless.”

Thanks, was just a little confused about the 'Star Wars' part.

[sunwings]

I found this on Reddit

I stumbled upon this channel on you tube searching upon information for planet x.In the search results i noticed that most of the recent upload were from the same channel.I decided to look it up.That channel is created less than 24 hours and its uploading videos every 25 seconds already with tons of videos.And im only ask How is this possible? here is the channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkiHw9BA2oq-UhWHu_ojmWw/videos?sort=dd&view=0&shelf_id=0

[Sojourner]

I found this on Reddit

I stumbled upon this channel on you tube searching upon information for planet x.In the search results i noticed that most of the recent upload were from the same channel.I decided to look it up.That channel is created less than 24 hours and its uploading videos every 25 seconds already with tons of videos.And im only ask How is this possible? here is the channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkiHw9BA2oq-UhWHu_ojmWw/videos?sort=dd&view=0&shelf_id=0


Unreal this thing is posting 2 videos every minute. Obviously some truth in there mix in with tons of disinfo. NSA spammers for sure behind this..

[Flash]

they do that to steal the revenue from the original owner and worst, afterward they make a complaint to YouTube claiming author right infringement from the real author, and the real author loses its YouTube account. David Wilcock has been caught in that robbery scheme and lost his channel.

So please, do not look at those videos, do not give those thiefs any money from your viewing.



I found this on Reddit

I stumbled upon this channel on you tube searching upon information for planet x.In the search results i noticed that most of the recent upload were from the same channel.I decided to look it up.That channel is created less than 24 hours and its uploading videos every 25 seconds already with tons of videos.And im only ask How is this possible? here is the channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkiHw9BA2oq-UhWHu_ojmWw/videos?sort=dd&view=0&shelf_id=0


Unreal this thing is posting 2 videos every minute. Obviously some truth in there mix in with tons of disinfo. NSA spammers for sure behind this..

[Karma Ninja]

It is quite common for large groups of bots to be used to assist in swaying stock market prices, online polls or votes. Even to simply give fake 'likes' and 'follows' to people so they appear to have more support or start 'trending' more.

It can be used to make it appear there is more activity on a page or profile. This one is large enough that it could be used for hacking. I would suspect there are hundreds like this for a variety of purposes.

edit: It appears most of what I said has already been mentioned. Make no mistake there are tons of these botnets and they help big corporations sway popularity.

[Lifebringer]

More AI training, like war video games.