9 Comments

Excellent piece. Thanks for everything you do... Everything.

Expand full comment

Wow, Spicy. What evil people, preying on the innocent and desperate. My first thought is, why so many Russian names? I then expected this would lead to the bot farms that fuqqed the 2016 election. Do you think there will eventually be a connection?

Expand full comment

Honestly I don’t know - but I’ve always maintained that the LinkedIn & Yahoo & OPM hacks had something to do with the 2016 election interference… the problem is to date I haven’t come across any court filings to substantiate my hypothesis.

What has been substantiated is Russia’a cyber attacks are a weaponization of data, specifically PII. My theory has been the Russian Govt’s hacks exfiltrated multiple terabytes of data, they dumped that info, likely used AI to aggregate the data and from there created targeted propaganda. The troll farm was only one tiny portion of Russia’a cyber war. The other working theory is Trump may have used various botnets to amplifying their “messaging” but I can’t prove those Botnets are of Russian origin. Again just a theory but it’s something that keeps nagging at me. My recollection is the times I was targeted on Twitter -a majority of the time it was triggered by my copious BotNet threads. It’s possible I’m over analyzing that and I might be biased because how could I not take it personally. Again it’s a hypothesis and I don’t have documents to support my theory —so it’s more than okay to be skeptical

Expand full comment

There were armies of bots at that time, and certain words or phrases triggered them. I was a victim only once, not the insane number of times you were. At least this guy has been caught.

Expand full comment

All I can say is "GET EM"

Expand full comment

I believe the phrase is "holy shittlestix" that's a lot of history

Expand full comment

Thank you Files.😊 Another good read. I don't understand a lot of this, but I'm glad this group was caught. No doubt there are hundreds maybe thousands of botnets. Law enforcement agencies have their hands full. I don't open spam and I don't open emails because of the danger. 😳 The internet is a scary place. I hope you and your lovely family enjoy the weekend. It has been very hot lately. Big hugs my dear, and thank you again for your work. I have a lot of reading to do this weekend.😁

Expand full comment

Hugs backatcha - hope the document dump wasn’t too much but I felt like someone needed to link all the botnets together and explain The Who,Why, What, When and how.

Expand full comment

Oh no your work is thorough and spot on as usual. Thank you.😊

Expand full comment