BRB I'm eating Twitter spammers :)

by Graham Cluley on October 20, 2009 | Comments Off

Filed Under: Social networks, Spam

In the last hour or so a stream of new accounts have been created on Twitter, with some curious similarities.

All of them have tweeted precisely twice so far. The first occasion they said "Hii" and they followed that up with

Brb, eating :)

Danika tells us she will be right back, presumably to start spamming

For those not fluent with txtspk, BRB means "Be right back".

As you can see below, there are dozens of these accounts - all with profile pictures of young women.

New Twitter accounts with identical updates

My guess is that this horde of newcomers to Twitters are the work of automated bots, planning to follow hundreds of users in the hope that they will be able to entice innocent parties to follow them back in return. Indeed, some of them already have followers despite not having posted anything meaningful.

Now, I'm going to do my bit and make use of the new spammer reporting feature on Twitter.

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About the author

Graham Cluley is senior technology consultant at Sophos. The readers of Computer Weekly voted him security blogger of the year in 2009 and 2010, and he pipped Stephen Fry to the title of "Twitter user of the year" too. Which was nice. He was also named "Best Security Blogger" by the readers of SC Magazine in 2011. You can subscribe to Graham's updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.