2017/01/10 by Juan Echeverría, Echeverría, Juan, Shi Zhou +1 · 2 voices · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Network Security and Intrusion Detection #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #Spam and Phishing Detection #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1701.02405
openalex publication_date 2017/01/10 · arxiv published 2017/01/10 · arxiv updated 2017/06/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It is known that many Twitter users are bots, which are accounts controlled and sometimes created by computers. Twitter bots can send spam tweets, manipulate public opinion and be used for online fraud. Here we report the discovery, retrieval, and analysis of the `Star Wars' botnet in Twitter, which consists of more than 350,000 bots tweeting random quotations exclusively from Star Wars novels. The botnet contains a single type of bot, showing exactly the same properties throughout the botnet. It is unusually large, many times larger than other available datasets. It provides a valuable source of ground truth for research on Twitter bots. We analysed and revealed rich details on how the botnet was designed and created. As of this writing, the Star Wars bots are still alive in Twitter. They have survived since their creation in 2013, despite the increasing efforts in recent years to detect and remove Twitter bots.We also reflect on the `unconventional' way in which we discovered the Star Wars bots, and discuss the current problems and future challenges of Twitter bot detection.