- Aug 17, 2017
- 1,485
The business of fake likes and followers turns out to be a sprawling enterprise — likely tied back to IoT botnet activity.
MONTREAL — While troll farms, influence campaigns and Twitter bots that spread disinformation have all become high-profile and negative aspects of the social media universe, new research shows that there is actually a rich and complex supply chain behind these efforts. “Social-media fraud is widespread and we know this – what we didn’t know was just how many players are actually involved in it,” explained Masarah Paquet-Clouston, a researcher with GoSecure, speaking at Virus Bulletin 2018 here on Thursday. Customer-facing websites that claim to be legitimate businesses, such as Devumi, market the ability to “quickly gain followers, viewers, likes and more” through vaguely defined “marketing tactics.” But behind the scenes, the researcher said, lies a complex chain of traffic resellers, platform providers and bot traffic – an apparatus that fuels the business of inflating social-media traffic as well as more nefarious activities such as influence campaigns.
Full Story Virus Bulletin 2018: Exposing the Social Media Fraud Ecosystem
MONTREAL — While troll farms, influence campaigns and Twitter bots that spread disinformation have all become high-profile and negative aspects of the social media universe, new research shows that there is actually a rich and complex supply chain behind these efforts. “Social-media fraud is widespread and we know this – what we didn’t know was just how many players are actually involved in it,” explained Masarah Paquet-Clouston, a researcher with GoSecure, speaking at Virus Bulletin 2018 here on Thursday. Customer-facing websites that claim to be legitimate businesses, such as Devumi, market the ability to “quickly gain followers, viewers, likes and more” through vaguely defined “marketing tactics.” But behind the scenes, the researcher said, lies a complex chain of traffic resellers, platform providers and bot traffic – an apparatus that fuels the business of inflating social-media traffic as well as more nefarious activities such as influence campaigns.
Full Story Virus Bulletin 2018: Exposing the Social Media Fraud Ecosystem
