Catch Me If You Can: Elon Musk Offers $1M Bounty To Nab And Convict Twitter Botnet Hackers

Following Twitter making some of its algorithms open-source, Elon Musk proposed a reward of $1 million to anyone who could pinpoint the origin of the “botnets” that allegedly aim at manipulating users’ reputation scores. 

What Happened: Since Twitter released some coding information, users and experts have shared their analysis. 

Steve Trey shared his tidbits about Twitter’s publicly released source code and said some factors that could reduce an account’s “reputation score” on the platform are: getting blocked, muted and reported for abuse or spam. 

See Also: Elon Musk Sends Stern Email To Twitter Employees At Unusual Time: ‘Office Is Not Optional’

Quote-tweeting the thread, another Twitter user said that this is how botnets — a network of hijacked computers infected with bot malware and remotely controlled by a hacker — are “crushing accounts.”

The user also asked Musk to count only mutes, blocks and reports from Twitter Blue subscribers. 

Responding to the tweet, Musk announced the $1 million bounty — but only when the threat actors are “convicted.”

Who is behind these botnets?

Million dollar bounty if convicted.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 2, 2023

Why It’s Important: Musk has long been promising to defeat spam and bots. 

Even before acquiring Twitter, he said, “we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!”

Previously, when disclosing the rationale behind relaunching Twitter Blue, Musk said, “We aren’t doing well at surfacing tweets from less prominent handles, as it’s almost impossible to distinguish between authentic humans vs bots/trolls.” 

However, the Twitter Blue launch was met with an increasing number of verified-but-fake accounts which impersonated leading brands and personalities, creating chaos on the platform.

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