Social media research group Graphikasaid it had discovered a Twitter botnet of around 3,000 bots that political spam pro-China, retweeting official messages from accounts promoting state propaganda.
Graphika said it was able to identify the botnet due to some similarities between the vast majority of bot accounts. Most of them used excerpts from Dracula for their profile description and for their first two tweets.
Graphika said the Dracula botnet, as it called the cluster of fake accounts, bore many similarities to previous Twitter botnets that were part of Spamouflage — a codename the company to the Chinese government’s social media influence campaigns. These campaigns were studied by Graphika in September 2019, April 2020 , and August 2020.
However, unlike previous campaigns promoting pro- China, the company discovered this new Twitter botnet early. It appears the botnet had only managed to amass 3,000 accounts, with the oldest dating back just a month, to July 2020.
Graphika said the botnet accounts themselves were not dangerous, as they appeared to be automated to quote Dracula and reply to others' tweets. However, the company said the accounts were used to amplify tweets and create topics that could be used to promote pro-China propaganda (usually portraying a distorted view of reality favorable to Beijing's international affairs).
The Twitter Dracula botnet has been down since August 20, according to Ben Nimmo, a researcher at Graphika.
In a post, Nimmo said that Twitter intervened and suspended the vast majority of the Dracula botnet Twitter accounts, marking those that were not removed as “restricted,” to prevent new content from being posted.
