Amazon-owned video streaming site Twitch is taking a scorched-earth approach in a bid to ferret out who is behind a "malicious spambot." The bots have been flooding streamers' public chats with offensive, repetitive messages that have sometimes rendered their channels "unusable."
PayPal, CloudFlare, Shaw, and Whois “are involved” in attacks, Twitch claims.
Twitch says the bots, beginning February 24, were posting an average of 34 messages per minute, with some channels being bombarded with up to nearly 700 a minute. Twitch says the attacks are "undermining its brand"—so far hitting about 1,000 channels with more than 150,000 spam messages that are racist and homophobic. Other messages, which were no match for Twitch's AutoMod tool to prevent such attacks, involved sexual harassment and the solicitation of child sex.
Twitch said it spent hundreds of hours investigating the attacks.
For full details: Twitch unleashes scorched-earth attack to unveil malicious spambot creator
PayPal, CloudFlare, Shaw, and Whois “are involved” in attacks, Twitch claims.
Twitch says the bots, beginning February 24, were posting an average of 34 messages per minute, with some channels being bombarded with up to nearly 700 a minute. Twitch says the attacks are "undermining its brand"—so far hitting about 1,000 channels with more than 150,000 spam messages that are racist and homophobic. Other messages, which were no match for Twitch's AutoMod tool to prevent such attacks, involved sexual harassment and the solicitation of child sex.
Twitch said it spent hundreds of hours investigating the attacks.
In the course of the Investigation, Twitch also determined that the attacker broadcast himself working on his bot software. Very shortly after the broadcast, Chatsurge.net was updated to offer that software. The attacker was associated with a Shaw IP address, namely 70.68.65.141. This IP address is located in Coquitlam, BC, Canada, and it is believed that the perpetrator of the Spambot Attacks is located in the same place as this IP address.
The PayPal account associated with Chatsurge.net uses the e-mail address feelmorebirds @gmail .com.
The PayPal account associated with Chatsurge.net uses the e-mail address feelmorebirds @gmail .com.
For full details: Twitch unleashes scorched-earth attack to unveil malicious spambot creator
