Twitter turns out that the bot account had an authentication badge

Twitter has introduced 'authentication badges ' to show that corporate and celebrity accounts are genuine and prevent spoofing. However, volunteer verification revealed that multiple accounts that used automatically generated synthetic facial photos for their profiles obtained authentication badges and formed a botnet with accounts that continuously threw spam.

Why Is Twitter Verifying These Bot Accounts on Its Site?
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/twitter-verified-bot-accounts/

Twitter U-turns after conferring society's highest honor – a blue check mark – on very obvious bot accounts • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/13/twitter_verified_fake/

This time, Twitter user Conspirador Norteño discovered that the bot account had an authorization badge. In a Twitter post posted on July 12, 2021, he reported that six accounts with authentication badges 'have 1000 followers even though they haven't tweeted, and the followers are almost the same.' did.

Meet @aykacmis , @degismece , @anlamislar , @aykacti , @kayitlii , and @donmedim , a sextet of blue-check verified Twitter accounts created on June 16th, 2021. None has yet tweeted and all have roughly 1000 followers (and mostly the * same * followers).

cc: @ZellaQuixote pic.twitter.com/V82Wtu0SNr

— Conspirador Norteño (@ conspirator0) July 12, 2021

According to Conspirador Norteño, 977 of the nearly 1000 followers on the six accounts are the same, and all of these accounts were created on June 19th or 20th, 2021. Conspirador Norteño said about this 'disguised in grassroots movement carry out the political claims and marketing Astroturfing a bot net,' pointed out was.

These six newly-created verified accounts have 977 followers in common. One is @verified (which follows all blue-check verified accounts). The other 976 were all created on June 19th or June 20th, 2021, and all follow the same 190 accounts . #Astroturf pic.twitter.com/N6kkh2DBZ3

— Conspirador Norteño (@ conspirator0) July 12, 2021

Most botnet accounts used images of 'This person does not exist ' to generate images of non-existent people and 'This cat does not exist ' to automatically generate fictitious cats for their profiles. In addition, the content of the tweets posted by the botnet was all Korean spam.

Very few of the accounts in this network have tweeted. The majority of the tweet content is spam in Korean sent via automation service dlvr (dot) it promoting a website. As always, be wary of clicking links to unknown sites posted by dodgy accounts. pic.twitter.com/DPDnmugx0g

— Conspirador Norteño (@ conspirator0) July 12, 2021

Former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos said of the issue: 'There is a possibility of a malicious or acquired internal human being committing a crime. A similar thing happens on Facebook's Instagram. I have had it. ' Stamos also said that many of the problem accounts are in Turkish, so it may be due to some national activity.

cc @rinkisethi

You might have a malicious or bribed insider. Something similar happened at IG (paid off by spammers, in that case).

— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2021

A Twitter spokeswoman said in a statement to multiple media, 'We accidentally approved a small number of fraudulent fake account authentication requests. We are based on our platform operations and spam policy. , Permanently frozen the account in question and stripped the verification badge. '