Duo Security has created open source tools and disclosed techniques that can be useful in identifying automated Twitter accounts, which are often used for malicious purposes.

The trusted access solutions provider, which Cisco recently agreed to acquire for $2.35 billion, has collected and studied 88 million Twitter accounts and over half-a-billion tweets. Based on this data, which the company says is one of the largest random datasets of Twitter accounts analyzed to date, researchers were able to create algorithms for differentiating humans from bots.