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Comment by heinrich5991 | Hacker News Reader

Because Twitter would be able to shut down your botnet.

Conceptually I agree with you, Twitter should be able to shut down a botnet like this by simply 'identifying bogus twitter accounts' (aka twitter bots) and 'deleting those accounts en masse.'

The part where it gets weird though is that twitter already has massive botnets which run around in it retweeting things and what not. Which they do not shut down. So is that because they don't want to? Because they can't? or simply because it isn't worth their time? That is still an unresolved question for me.

I suspect it's because the Twitter bots inflate the user count of Twitter. It seems that even though Twitter's monetization is not the greatest, their valuation mostly comes from the number of users on Twitter. The reasoning process seems to be something like, "Twitter doesn't make a lot of money right now, but they have the ear of some 300 million users, and that's going to be valuable in the future when they get their monetization story correct, right?" And so TWTR prices are kept afloat. Bots probably degrade the user experience of Twitter quite a bit, but if Twitter aggressively bans all bots, their user count goes down maybe 15%[1], and what does that do to their stock price?

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.03107.pdf

Good observations. However, user experience matters more in growing the company (it helps user growth and retention), rather than user numbers and short-term stock price

Yes - but who is calling the shots?

Wait, what's wrong with Twitter bots? I run one that tweets questions made on a QA platform, and people seem to find it useful.

Some are shitty, but that seems considerably harder to detect.

That's why you disguise the CNC commands as legitimate social media noise.

Then you can double dip - sell what the content of the command/abort messages are (or just allow for 'padding' messages for advertising in between) and suddenly your botnet doubles as a completely legitimate social media firm

Super bonus round: Launder your money from botnet activities through the social media firm's books

(I am, of course, kidding)

That wasn't just an idea. People have used Twitter for exactly this purpose for a long time, because it skews user numbers. I'd also assume that overhead is very low for c&c botnets, since its ultimately just a little pubsub message queue, so there's even less incentive to shut them down. I get at LEAST three followers a day with "buy RTs, followers" in their profile on my personal Twitter.

Spam botnets ain't nothing new. They'll ways be around.

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