“One of the most interesting aspects of this spam operation is the preservation and recovery tactics employed by its operator in order to avoid anti-spam measures. ” explained noted Symantec’s Satnam Narang. 

Symantec is investigating on the Twitter spam campaign sharing the results of its analysis Bitly, Google, and GoDaddy, in order to identify the operators and take down their infrastructure. Fortunately, the spammers committed a few errors that advantaged the investigations.

“Despite the use of Mockingbird, Parrot, and Egg accounts, as well as interesting tactics to preserve and recover accounts, the author failed to cover his tracks in certain areas,” continues Narang. “Each of the domains was registered without private registration, revealing this individual’s real name and address. The Bitly accounts used for creating short URLs were associated with this individual’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. Lastly, he converted one of his Parrot accounts into a personal account, where he instructed his Parrot accounts to retweet and favorite some of his own tweets. We were able to link this spam operation to a single individual by combining these missteps.”

Unfortunately, the distracted and superficial behavior of many users benefits this type of spam campaigns, users must be careful about the identity of the profile who they follow on Twitter. Before retweeting any message be sure of the content you are sharing and its source. Don’t forget also that to verify the authenticity of a Twitter account you can rely on blue verified badge that Twitter platform uses.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  Twitter,  spam)