Wednesday, August 8, 2018

How susceptible are Twitter and Facebook to spreading malicious cryptocurrency botnets?

Colleagues, yesterday Duo Security reported that some 88 million Twitter accounts fell prey to a malicious botnet spreading a fraudulent cryptocurrency giveaway program. Many of us, myself included, saw messages from this botnet and simply paid no attention. Nonetheless, the security issued a paper at the Black Hat 2018 conference entitled “Don’t @ Me – Hunting Twitter Bots at Scale.” The paper describes the “Anatomy of a Twitter Bot” on page 14 of the report. We know that Facebook and Twitter have purportedly taken major steps to reinforce their platform and account security in recent months given pressure from the US Congress and the European Union. Bottom line: How secure are social media platforms against penetration by and in turn spreading malware such as the Twitter botnet? The fact that the about 88 million accounts we effected strongly suggests that social media take a quantum leap in security to ensure their users remain secure. As of this writing Twitter has not publically affirmed this attack. Duo Security plans to publish mitigation tactics for this malware on GitHub in the coming days. Share your comments today! Lawrence – Cryptocurrency Academy (https://cryptocurrencyacademy.blogspot.com/)  

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