AddFollowers spam hits Twitter accounts

Ever wanted to be an internet celebrity? Millions of strangers following your every Twitter belch and stomach rumble, just like Ashton Kutcher or Britney Spears?

Okay, so maybe you don’t want to be quite that famous, but chances are that if you’re on Twitter you may want a few more people to follow you, so you can exercise more influence on the Twittersphere.

Well, be careful what you wish for – and be extremely cautious of using third party services which promise to grab you thousands of new followers.

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Right now we’re seeing a large number of Twitter accounts advertising the services of AddFollowers.net, a website that claims that it can find you “TONS of followers”.

And guess what, they all seem to be spreading the same message (or variants thereof). In some cases, we’ve seen individual Twitter accounts that have advertised the website more than twenty times in a row. That definitely doesn’t sound like legitimate behaviour to me.

AddFollowers Twitter spam

So, if you’ve found out that your Twitter account has been sending messages advertising AddFollowers, I would recommend that you change your password immediately. And next time a third-party website asks you to hand over your username and password for Twitter, steer well clear.

Of course, it’s possible that the Twitter accounts that are sending the messages advertising AddFollowers have not signed-up for the site themselves, but have been compromised in some other way. Even so, that’s still a good reason to change your Twitter password. If you need help choosing a memorable password that’s hard to crack you should watch our video on the subject.


Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and hosts the popular "Smashing Security" podcast. Follow him on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Mastodon, or drop him an email.

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