Quick question for the community: Over the past few days, has anyone noticed unusual follower activity? I'm talking about sudden spikes with accounts that look... automated? What I'm Seeing My follower count jumped from ~50 to 130…

Sichere Programmierung dev.to 16.11.2025, 00:41 Uhr 2 Min. Lesezeit KRITIS / Energie

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Quick question for the community: Over the past few days, has anyone noticed unusual follower activity? I'm talking about sudden spikes with accounts that look... automated?

What I'm Seeing

My follower count jumped from ~50 to 130 basically overnight. When I checked the profiles, nearly all the new followers had:

Zero posts, completely empty bios

Generic username patterns (user_xxxxx style)

Default avatars

No activity history (no comments, reactions, nothing)

Account created recently

Why I'm Asking

Before I assume this is a platform-wide issue, I wanted to check if others are experiencing the same thing. I built a quick Python audit script to analyze my followers, and the results were... concerning. Nearly 80% of my recent followers match classic bot characteristics.

For the Security/Data Folks

If you've seen similar patterns, I'm curious what heuristics you're using to detect them. My current approach checks:

Profile completeness (bio presence, post count, avatar type)

Username entropy and common bot patterns

Account age vs. activity ratio

Engagement signals (comments, reactions, follows/following ratio)

The pattern is pretty consistent across the suspected accounts, which suggests automated account creation rather than organic growth.

Not Trying to Be Alarmist

I've already reached out to the Dev.to team to share my findings. I'm not here to complain—I genuinely want to understand if this is:

Something others are experiencing

A known issue the team is already addressing

Just me being paranoid about metrics that don't really matter

For those of us trying to build real credibility here—especially in security, research, and data-integrity fields—follower authenticity actually matters. When half the engagement comes from accounts that look automated or inactive, it dilutes the signal and makes it harder to measure genuine reach. And in this line of work, when you're building and testing security tools, visibility can make you a target. So… anyone else noticing this?

Have you noticed similar follower spikes?

Are you seeing the same bot patterns?

Should we even care about follower counts if they're this easy to game?

Would be interested to hear if this is isolated or part of a broader pattern.

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dev[.]to

CTI Threat Relationship Graph2 Knoten / 1 Relationen

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Syntax validiert (0 Fehler)

title: Detect Exploitation - Has Anyone Else Seen a Suspicious Follower Spike Recently?
id: 093df8ac-e59d-4c08-91f6-7dcb196d672d
status: experimental
description: Automatisch generierte SIEM-Erkennungsregel basierend auf CTI Intelligence
references:
  - https://tsecurity.de/
author: iShareStuff CTI Automated Detection Engine
date: 2026-09-24
logsource:
  category: network_connection
  product: any
detection:
  selection:
      DestinationHostname:
        - 'dev.to'
  condition: selection
falsepositives:
  - Legitime administrative Zugriffe oder Penetrationstests
level: high
tags:
  - attack.initial_access

Syntax validiert (0 Fehler)

rule CTI_Threat_Indicator {
    meta:
        author = "iShareStuff CTI Automated Detection Engine"
        date = "2026-09-24"
        description = "YARA Signature for "
    strings:
        $str = "Has Anyone Else Seen a Suspici" ascii wide
    condition:
        any of them
}

Syntax validiert (0 Fehler)

index=security sourcetype IN ("cisco:asa", "pan:traffic", "zeek_conn", "suricata", "WinEventLog:Security")
(dest_host="dev.to")
| stats count earliest(_time) as first_seen latest(_time) as last_seen by src_ip, dest_ip, dest_host, signature
| eval first_seen=strftime(first_seen, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"), last_seen=strftime(last_seen, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
| sort - count

Syntax validiert (0 Fehler)

destination.domain: ("dev.to") and event.category: "network"

Syntax validiert (0 Fehler)

CommonSecurityLog
| where DestinationHostName in ("dev.to")
| summarize EventCount = count(), FirstSeen = min(TimeGenerated), LastSeen = max(TimeGenerated) by SourceIP, DestinationIP, DestinationPort, Activity
| extend DetectionRule = "iShareStuff-CTI-Compiled"
| sort by EventCount desc

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Kognitive Analyse für identifizierte Bedrohung: Erhöhte Bedrohungslage im Bereich Has Anyone Else Seen a Suspicious Follow.... Basierend auf 368k Vektor-Korrelationen werden sofortige Isolationsmaßnahmen für betroffene Endpunkte empfohlen.

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