These are visibly part of one network. All have the same profile picture. Six of the seven cited here, and many others with the same picture, have the same formula of bio (“Cosplay fan. Traveler,” or similar designations, plus an invitation to a website). All post the same sort of content, a mixture of multilingual retweets and similar or identical revealing photos.

All have creation dates ranging from 2011 to 2014, and their screen names do not match their handles; thus, @ermolaeva_olya’s screen name is “Gladys Flatcher,” rather than, for example, “Olya Ermolaeva.” Like @LanaLana05, @ermolaeva_olya’s posts jumped straight from innocuous Russian, in August 2012, to pornographic English, in March 2018.

Taken together, these features confirm that this is a botnet. Moreover, it is a botnet apparently built of hijacked accounts — accounts created by genuine users in the 2011–14 period, and then abandoned, to be taken over by bot herders at a later stage.

Hijacking accounts in this way allows bot herders to build up large networks without having to create masses of accounts at one time, and thus lets them avoid some of Twitter’s automated detection systems. Some effort seems to have been made to change the screen names to appropriate female ones, in keeping with the profile picture, and to delete some of the accounts’ earlier posts. It is likely that the remaining posts left in the timelines of @ermolaeva_olya and @LanaLana05 were an oversight.

Interestingly, three of the seven accounts here used “Kelly” as either a first name or family name. This suggests that the names were drawn from a list, with first and family names mixed at random to give them the appearance of individuality.

Quoting Austen

As we analyzed the network, we found more and more bots using other, similar biographies and profile pictures, of Cortana Blue and other models. Many shared one peculiar characteristic: they would periodically break off from their lingerie posts to quote fragments from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.

Thus, @bcdeeffg (screen name “Pamela Dodson,” profile picture Cortana Blue) tweeted, “saying but Lucy’s countenance” on May 21. As a check on Google Books shows, this phrase, properly punctuated, comes in a conversation between Elinor Dashwood and Lucy Steele.

Above: Tweet by @bcdeeffg, archived on May 30, 2018. Below: Quote from Sense and Sensibility. (Source: Twitter / @bcdeeffg / Google Books)

Account @keamalao (screen name “Rebecca Eddington,” profile picture Cortana Blue) tweeted, “anybody butmyself.’ Elinor smiled, and.” Properly punctuated, this, again, is a quote from the elder and more sensible (in the modern sense) of the two Misses Dashwood.

Above: Tweet by @keamalao, archived on May 30, 2018. Below: Quote from Sense and Sensibility. (Source: Twitter / @keamalao / Google Books)

Rebecca’s profile picture (or Cortana’s) was equally popular among Twitter users.