Twitch unleashes scorched-earth attack to unveil malicious spambot creator
Amazon-owned video streaming site Twitch is taking a scorched-earth approach in a bid to ferret out who is behind a "malicious spambot." The bots have been flooding streamers' public chats with offensive, repetitive messages that have sometimes rendered their channels "unusable."
Twitch says the bots, beginning February 24, were posting an average of 34 messages per minute, with some channels being bombarded with up to nearly 700 a minute. Twitch says the attacks are "undermining its brand"-so far hitting about 1,000 channels with more than 150,000 spam messages that are racist and homophobic. Other messages, which were no match for Twitch's AutoMod tool to prevent such attacks, involved sexual harassment and the solicitation of child sex.
Twitch, which bills itself as the "leading video platform and community for gamers," says it has traced the attacks to Chatsurge.net, which offers spambot attacks for sale. From there, Twitch investigators believe the perpetrator is associated with the e-mail address of obnoxious@dongcorp.org and a Shaw Communications IP address of 70.68.65.141 located in Coquitlam, British Columbia. In addition, Twitch thinks a PayPal account associated with the e-mail feelmorebirds@gmail.com is connected, according to court documents.
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