Hacker News Reader

Comment by iso8859-1 | Hacker News Reader

First pentester I found with 12k followers on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/al_shwele/ but 8 on GitHub: https://github.com/Alaa-abdulridha

Instagram keeps surprising me...

View on HN

The majority of the accounts following him have 0 posts, very low amount of followers and follow thousands of other people. They are most likely bought or collected via an online bot tool. Further quantitative evidence: His posts have a very low amount of likes and comments.

61 likes off 13k followers..yeah, that's a tough sell.

> The majority of the accounts following him have 0 posts, very low amount of followers and follow thousands of other people.

There's also the issue of "follower farmers". Basically, some spam accounts start following tens of thousands of people hoping at least some will check their profiles, maybe follow them back or click on their spam.

I noticed this mostly on Twitter, and after some digging, it turns out to be a common tactic used by spammer bots (or umm, "marketting teams"). I don't know how common that issue is on Instagram though but it could be same.

I see this often on twitter. Some account with dozens of thousands of followers, if not more, and very little reaction to their tweet (less than 10 per tweet). It’s obvious to the trained eyes that they just bought followers. I can’t be mad honestly, it’s pretty cheap to signal that you’re a big deal by doing this.

That's often the case, but on Twitter it's sometimes also just inactive followers. Not uncommon to have 10+ year old accounts now which might've been big some time, but with 95% of those followers being inactive now.

Too bad Twitter didn't do the purge of inactive accounts, would've been interesting.

Not sure about that account, but penetration testing is actually fairly popular in the Middle East. Cost of living is typically quite low, so decent researchers can make a living from bug bounties.

Fun fact: Tunisia, a relatively small North African country, was awarded the second highest number of Facebook bounties this year[1].

[1]: https://about.fb.com/news/2020/11/bug-bounty-program-10th-an...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com