Is detailed audit of Twitter account activity possible?

Question

I maintain a mildly popular Twitter account that's mostly passive (schedules regular updates), hence barely follows anyone.

Recently I've noticed strange activity: my account started following people on its followers list sequentially, which indicates automated activity, reaching a total of 400 (not including people with private feeds). Suspecting that the account is compromised (I don't have any apps connected that are allowed to follow other than command line tools token on my laptop), I changed the password and revoked third-party application access.

However, I'm still at a loss as to what exactly was compromised.

1. Is there a way to get a detailed audit of Twitter account activity? (i.e. what app/API token was used to perform particular actions)

2. Assuming the actions were malicious, what possible benefit could a hacker get by making the account mass-follow-back its existing followers?

Answer 1

I believe that any activity of this kind should be reported immediately to Twitter admins. And they surely have many powerful tools to do inspection for you.

Even, if not, I wouldn't try to solve security-related, hacking and access or account compromise issues on my own hand. This is this kind of case, that should be IMO solved with particular service admins and for sure should have to be at least reported to them

And I think, that you'll find rules, that you should do this, and proper instructions in any good class Internet service. There were (too) many stories around Internet, that people's accounts were blocked or even terminated for violation of these rules and for not reporting any security issues.

Also, take a look at this answer for more details on a very similar case.