Title: A Simulated Cyberattack on Twitter: Assessing Partisan Vulnerability to Spear Phishing and Disinformation ahead of the 2018 U.S. Midterm Elections,
Abstract: State-sponsored "bad actors" increasingly weaponize social media platforms to
launch cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns during elections. Social media
companies, due to their rapid growth and scale, struggle to prevent the
weaponization of their platforms. This study conducts an automated spear
phishing and disinformation campaign on Twitter ahead of the 2018 United States
Midterm Elections. A fake news bot account - the @DCNewsReport - was created
and programmed to automatically send customized tweets with a "breaking news"
link to 138 Twitter users, before being restricted by Twitter.
Overall, one in five users clicked the link, which could have potentially led
to the downloading of ransomware or the theft of private information. However,
the link in this experiment was non-malicious and redirected users to a Google
Forms survey. In predicting users' likelihood to click the link on Twitter, no
statistically significant differences were observed between right-wing and
left-wing partisans, or between Web users and mobile users. The findings signal
that politically expressive Americans on Twitter, regardless of their party
preferences or the devices they use to access the platform, are at risk of
being spear phishing on social media.