Political manipulation is a problem, but I don't think it's nearly as profitable as pushing scams and gambling.

You'd be surprised as how there's individuals and organizations willing to pay a lot of money to do political manipulation / influencing.

> ... and organizations willing to pay a lot of money to do political manipulation / influencing.

Like what, parties campaigning?

We're talking about foreign influence here. All recent US and German elections reeked of Russian dark money, then there was the entire Cambridge Analytica mess and before that it was Brexit.

And Elon Musks dark money. Don't forget that. He gives his best to influence european politics.

Don't think he gives money, but yes, he definitely does everything he can to help out the far-right with his global audience.

Not every result you dislike is "Russian inference".

more like it would be from the nation state level. for example, RU pushing these lil psyop bots to get Trump elected and/or grow the divide in between Ds and Rs.

Pushing certain talking points, managing discourse, amplifying certain people/events/whatever. Not all of it is nation-state stuff, some things are just lobbying and influence-building and market manipulation. Spreading rumors for shady purposes is a very old scam.

just get residential botnets to watch ur youtube channel click all the adds u dont need many bots..There are many ways to monetize things.

Governments just run sim farms etc. they dont need to use this kind of approach for political influece. Not to say that some dont but generally they will not be stealing accounts. (most bots involved in campaigns to get trump in his seat were not stolen accounts)

It's more profitable because it allows you to select political perspectives that allow you, the scammer and or gambler, to scam or gamble harder.

I suspect that politicians right before elections may pay more than standard gambling. They gamble with much higher stakes.

Hah, outsourcing political "influencing" to tiny "consulting" companies that promise great things but is a rickety AI slop shop in the backend.

I suppose the only difference to the Big 4 is the price tag.

I guess politicians could claim to be hiring a voter research company and profess to be oblivious to the "voter hacking" schemes (hacking the voters' minds to lean whichever way the politician wants them to lean).

On that level, power and control trumps profit

a kind of

It doesn’t need to be profitable if it’s cheap - political manipulation by unsavory parties is worth a cheap botnet if it means they can keep power and keep grifting.

I will agree with a sibling up there that the political part is pure speculation, and I’d guess anyone running a moderately sized botnet is open to use for any nefarious purposes if the price is right.

2 is full on speculation. It can be any kind of purpose.

Yes, a lot of compromised accounts are just put onto a marketplace of sorts, either selling the account itself directly or offered as services to promote a product / political talking point / propaganda / engagement.

Or it could just be that someone vibe coded the worm, and vibe coding is relatively young.

I like how quickly this got dismissed as speculation as though we don't live in an age where election tampering and manipulation of public opinion for political reasons are so commonplace that incidents of it just blend in with the other forgettable global headlines.

Because it is speculation, with no special evidence. Could it be for just money? You can sell access to exploited systems in interesting companies for quite a bit of money. Or maybe it was for general use to twist public opinion in the future, not tied to those specific elections. Or just plain spying, We can't be sure, and the net was cast quite narrowly.

One could research where those repos are coming from, and do forensics on who controls the trojan network. But that wasn't done, so right now, it's all speculation. Something can be very worrying without us knowing exactly what the use cases for it will be

Speculation: It probably is just for money. Then the ppl buying, at least some of them, are likely to be engaging in the type of activity described.

Indeed, and it troubles me that people don't know the difference between speculation (no matter how plausible) and analysis based on evidence. The anti-science movement (or impulse) is still pervasive, unfortunately.

Why would they steal credentials when governments already have fake accounts for this exact purpose (see UK’s JTRIG from the Snowden documents)

… you also have to remember that the JTRIG leaked docs were about a decade before LLMs, so you could imagine tooling these days is 100x a they used to have

that things happen doesnt mean you do not need evidence 0xEF. No evidence was presented, so its speculation. It is _much_ more common to do other things than election tampering as desired effect of cyber activities. The amount of election tampering activities is statistically insignificant to other activities conducted in this domain.

That doesn't seem likely, given that there's a reference from February 2025 documenting the pattern.

While 2 is possible, we've had automated ransomware going for some time now. The agents in 1 are sufficient.