Question

All engineers register to Twitter. Any twitter user can post as many messages as he/she likes and any user can follow other user so the first one receives copies of the second user tweets. Any use can see the sample of random tweets. Is it possible a bad guy called botmaster to organize a botnet? Describe how that could happened along with the role of the botmaster.

Answer 1

Here, In this case users can register on twitter and any user can post as many messages. Every user can follow other users and can get a copy of their posts and respond to the same.

Botmaster and Botnet?

Bot (In this case)

Bots are software applications that are taught with certain tasks and steps. The bots will perform automated tasks that are already taught to them.

Bot network

Simply network of bots, ie; one or more bots as nodes connected together to form a network which is given internet access to perform the automated tasks.

Botmaster

Botmaster acts as a master of many slave bots or bot networks. The Botmaster controls all the other bots similar to a centralized system. The botmaster itself can be software or an individual human. Botmaster controls the task done by each bot, giving instruction and fixing errors etc.

Here in this figure, The center node is the botmaster which controls all the botnets and bots connected to the same.

Spamming With Bots
The botmaster and its bots could create their own accounts and post any post one after the other. This spams the twitter post wall where we see the latest posts.

To avoid issues, twitter has a lot of security measures. Twitter analyses the activity done by each account including the bot accounts and identifies which one is a legible user activity and which one is not. After analyzing the bot activities and accounts twitter may ban the account and the IP address group linked with the same.

Thus twitter automated bots will detect the unwanted spamming bots on their social network and removes and bans the same as soon as they confirm it is a bot.