Botnets Now Use Twitter for Computer Attacks

by Hovhannes Avoyan | Aug 17, 2009

A “botnet” is a collection of software robots that can run anonymously, autonomously, and interactively. Botnets are associated with malicious use of the internet and create spam or carry out distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). Botnet traditionally uses the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network to distribute commands in order to compromise computers. Last week, however, a security researcher found that botnet owners were using Twitter to distribute these disruptive instructions. A now-disabled Twitter account was used to post “tweets” that had links to new commands which were used by the botnet-infected machines to send spam or to execute denial-of-service attacks. Botnet owners are always looking for new ways to wreak havoc and to keep their networks up and running. It was Twitter that fell victim of DDoS attack last week when Twitter users found their accounts unavailable.