While Twitch cracks down on hate raids, suing two users suspected of being responsible, another bot issue has surfaced and this time it involves ‘hoss’ or ‘hoss00132′ accounts. But many are wondering what exactly they are and how does it work?
These accounts are frequently followed by botting streamers, with many of them featuring some variation of ‘hoss’ followed by numbers and random words. Follow bots are inconvenient, but they’re usually harmless, don’t pose a security risk, and should be quickly removed from the platform.
These hoss bots, on the other hand, are thought to be unique because there have been reports that they can expose a user’s IP address simply by visiting their profile.
This problem has been reported by Twitch users for over a month saying that they recently got followed by a person that looked like a spam/bot account so they went to their channel to attempt to report it for botting and added that they were live when he checked out their channel, but according to their description, they have something grabbing the IPs of people who were watching their stream.
Twitch’s extensions system, according to another user on the Twitch subreddit, can leak basic information such as “IP, country, ISP, browser version, device type, OS, battery level, whether it’s charging or not, device orientation, screen size, preferred language.
It’s unclear whether these bot accounts pose a real security risk to users, but they’re certainly a problem on the platform especially the heightened hate surrounding the platform with its marginalized streamers and content creators also there are likely others who don’t go by the name ‘hoss,’ so it won’t be easy to find them all.
In the meantime, users can use this document to access a list of known accounts. According to the document, “Twitch is aware of the issue.”
