{"id":33671,"date":"2017-01-20T23:05:53","date_gmt":"2017-01-21T07:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/350000-twitter-bot-sleeper-cell-betrayed"},"modified":"2017-06-04T07:54:51","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T14:54:51","slug":"350000-twitter-bot-sleeper-cell-betrayed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/350000-twitter-bot-sleeper-cell-betrayed","title":{"rendered":"350,000 Twitter bot sleeper cell betrayed by love of Star Wars and Windows Phone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/350000-twitter-bot-sleeper-cell-betrayed-by-love-of-star-wars-and-windows-phone.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Computer boffins Juan Echeverria and Shi Zhou at University College London have chanced across a dormant Twitter botnet made up of more than 350,000 accounts with a fondness for quoting <i>Star Wars<\/i> novels.<\/p>\n<p>Twitter bots have been accused of warping the tone of the 2016 election. They also can be used for entertainment, marketing, spamming, manipulating Twitter\u2019s trending topics list and public opinion, trolling, fake followers, malware distribution, and data set pollution, among other things.<\/p>\n<p>In a recently published <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/regmedia.co.uk\/2017\/01\/20\/starwarsbotnet.pdf\">research paper<\/a>, the two computer scientists recount how a random sampling of 1 per cent of English-speaking Twitter accounts \u2013 about 6 million accounts \u2013 led to their discovery.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/m.theregister.co.uk\/2017\/01\/20\/researchers_uncover_350k_dormant_twitter_bots\/\">http:\/\/m.theregister.co.uk\/2017\/01\/20\/researchers_uncover_35...tter_bots\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Computer boffins Juan Echeverria and Shi Zhou at University College London have chanced across a dormant Twitter botnet made up of more than 350,000 accounts with a fondness for quoting Star Wars novels. Twitter bots have been accused of warping the tone of the 2016 election. They also can be used for entertainment, marketing, spamming, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,1512,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybercrime-malcode","category-mobile-phones","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33671"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59049,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33671\/revisions\/59049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}