I was pondering the point of Twitter again today. It is so much like IRC. If you step away and don’t read updates for a few days (or you have a really busy list you’re following!), there is no way to really catch back up on what was said or jump back into a conversation. In fact, you likely will miss reponses even directed to you! Just like stepping away from IRC and it continuing to scroll on by.
So, I wonder when a botnet will use Twitter for command-and-control?
While using twitter to control a botnet would be an interesting POC, I’m not sure there’s a real advantage to using twitter over regular http command/control protocols that have been before seen in botnets. Seems like something that could be easily shut down once twitter was notified.
What would be really cool (or frustrating, depending on your viewpoint), would be to protect your updates, and manually allow access to bots for the bot-owners timeline, thus lessening the chance of discovery. Would still have to figure out a way to differentiate bots and security researchers who want to find out what commands you’re sending 🙂
Definitely interesting stuff, maybe one day we’ll see bots that do exactly that; hide their signal in the noise of regular traffic on social networking sites.