As a current Digital Forensics Researcher and Digital Marketing company owner, I tend to watch trends in the digital forensic field as they pertain to social media marketing and digital marketing. I was reviewing a client’s Twitter followers and noticed a large abnormal drop in their followers. After a short panic and more research, I learned Twitter and Facebook had deleted a few hundred accounts and categorized them as “fake” out of Russia and Iran.
Normally this would not concern me, but I started looking at a few trends in the digital forensics market and noticed that several software companies had large drops in Twitter followers in the time period Twitter canceled the accounts.
Why does this concern us?
It appears (I do stress appears) that these fake social media accounts were purposely following digital forensics and incident response companies. My first question is “why”? Was it a random following act or more targeted. Were there other motivations involved? We may never know.
I did create this video where I show the charts and date ranges of the Twitter deletion and you can clearly see where it happens across many DFIR companies.
The moral of this article is to watch your social media management efforts and stay aware as to who may be following you, why they are following you. Not an easy task, but spread the word to both Digital Marketing folks and Digital Forensic Investigators
