I've received mention spam in the past on Twitter, but last week it was used against me as a primitive DoS attack on my account (a DoS on my time). In a very short period of time after having tweeted something regarding the fallacy of vaccines and autism, I started receiving @mention spam from a user who was spamming all accounts that had RT'd my original tweet as well as me. Even if I blocked that account, a new one would pop up immediately after that and it effectively rendered my Mentions column in TweetDeck useless while this 'attack' was taking place.
It's nice to know that the accounts were quickly disabled but a more nefarious individual or group could have caused even more problems, and it does seem that Twitter should have some sort of prefiltering heuristics in place (if they don't already exist) to prevent this kind of abuse (new account / low # of tweets / low # of followers / consistent message 'n link being sent).
It's nice to know that the accounts were quickly disabled but a more nefarious individual or group could have caused even more problems, and it does seem that Twitter should have some sort of prefiltering heuristics in place (if they don't already exist) to prevent this kind of abuse (new account / low # of tweets / low # of followers / consistent message 'n link being sent).