Millions of Twitter accounts could be involved in a massive botnet, according to Cryptome, a site dedicated to publishing data.
Business Insider reports:
Twitter has already begun disabling some of the accounts cited as bots on Cryptome, such as this one belonging to "Marissa Tanyat."
"We have a variety of automated and manual controls to detect, flag, and suspend accounts created solely for spam purposes. We’ve also taken legal action to shut down these spammers—in April 2012 we filed suit against five of the most aggressive outfits," a company spokesperson tells Business Insider.
The Cryptome claim was made by Paul Dietrich, a self-described "really nerdy" unemployed programmer from Eugene, Ore. He told Business Insider he was searching for tweets about NSA leaker Edward Snowden and discovered the results were polluted with hundreds of nonsense tweets.