Design And Implementation Of A Social Microblogging Bot

With the development of botnet, a new type of social zombies is rapidlydeveloping. Compared with the traditional botnets, the social zombies’ command andcontrol channel are based on the social networking platform. Micro-blog is one of theChinese largest social network platforms and there are millions of activity users. Theusers release hundreds of news in internet, with the number of microblog usersincreasing. However, when some micro-blog users’ accounts are controlled by hacker,it will cause significant harm for micro-blog platform and its users. The cases haveoccurred in a number of social networks, such as koobface botnet discovered onFacebook, Nazbot botnet discovered on Twitter, and so on.Facing with the growing threat of botnets, researchers have proposed varieties ofdetection methods of social zombies. There have been social botnets focusedon Facebook, Twitter and MySpace platforms. Although most researchers analyzedspam, fake accounts and so on, there is few researcher analyzing micro-blog. Theroot of these spam and fake accounts may be generated by bots. Therefore, studyingthe operating mode of social zombies on the host is particularly important.This article builds a social botnet based on the microblogging platform toanalyze the differences between social and traditional bots, structure and principles ofsocial zombies, and then we detect the social bot on the host. We’ll publish controlcommands through a micro-blog account in our design microblogging botnet. Thebots get information by personal account using open API interface and regard themicroblogging platform as a command and control channel carrier. And then, there areresponse behavior on the host or the microblogging platform. We can publish the spanthrough microblogging platform, and steal users’privacy information through e-mail.The host and network activity are the main activities of the microblogging zombie. Host activities include query system host MAC address, browse the web,access card information, shutdown and restart the machine, screen shots, upload-user to botmaster, execute the command specified file, modify the e-mail address tosend and receive. And network activities include sign-on platform, get the latestmicroblogging news of the zombie controller, updates the user microblogging status,access to microblogging fans information of the user accounts. The social zombies inthis article are only used for proof of concept, and won’t open source or commercialpurposes.