Thursday, January 06, 2011

Twitter Spammers Evolved

I received a spam tweet this morning in response to one about Amazon. Out of curiosity I had a look at the account and found an evolution in the spammer toolbox on Twitter. The account is KalilaHirata152, which I've reported as spam.

What this spammer is doing is that it triggers a tweet with a URL on keyword but to make it look less spammy, also creates tweets that consist solely of quotes from books. These quote tweets are interspaced within the feed with a ratio of about 1 book quote to every 1.5 url tweets.

While obvious to humans the slight variation in tweets is enough to get past many simple spam filters. The ongoing arms race against spammers continues apace.