In the span of two weeks, hackers have broken into more than 2,500 Twitter accounts with large followings, including those of electro-funk duo Chromeo, comedian Azeem Banatwala, football star Cecil Shorts III, and late New York Times journalist David Carr, according to new research by security firm Symantec. The hacked accounts were then replaced with porn and sexbots, and used to tweet links to adult dating sites. The victims had their display names changed, with their profile pictures swapped for pictures of scantily-clad women. While sexbots or pornbots are nothing new on Twitter, a platform that’s been plagued with fake accounts for years, this campaign is different because it uses almost exclusively real accounts that got hacked, according to Satnam Narang, the senior security response manager at Symantec, and the one who investigated this campaign.
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ORIGINAL SOURCE: Motherboard
