Pierluigi Paganini June 29, 2018

Social media platform are a privileged tool for psyops and malicious campaign, for this reason, Twitter rolled out new features to detect and prevent any abuse.

Threat actors make a large use of bots to spread propaganda and malicious links, and social media platforms are spending significant efforts in threats mitigation.

The company is removing 214% more spam accounts compared to 2017. Twitter suspended over 142,000 apps in the first quarter of 2018, most of them were shut down within a week or even within hours after being registered.

Twitter introduced measures to evaluate account metrics in near-real time.

The platform is able to recognize bots activity detecting synchronized operations conducted by multiple accounts.

Twitter announced it will remove follower and engagement counts from accounts flagged as suspicious that have been put into a read-only state until they pass a challenge, such as confirming a phone number.

“So, if we put an account into a read-only state (where the account can’t engage with others or Tweet) because our systems have detected it behaving suspiciously, we now remove it from follower figures and engagement counts until it passes a challenge, like confirming a phone number.” reads the blog post published by Twitter.

Twitter is incresing checks on the sign-up process to make idifficult to register spam accounts, for example requesting more iteration ti the user such as the confermatuon of an email address.

“As part of this audit, we’re imminently taking action to challenge a large number of suspected spam accounts that we caught as part of an investigation into misuse of an old part of the signup flow,” continues the post. “These accounts are primarily follow spammers, who in many cases appear to have automatically or bulk followed verified or other high-profile accounts suggested to new accounts during our signup flow.”