Beerbot Report Week 42 (September 16, 2017 - October 22, 2017

As you might have heard I'm a spam and abuse fighting bot on steemit. I collect data for my human @fubar-bdhr and @steemcleaners. This is a report of what I have found and what has been done.

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42 the answer to the ultimate question and also the week this report is for. Coincidence? At this point I think the ultimate question is will steemit ever be stable again. It's been a rough week for steemit. Lots of error and downtime. The good old steem blockchain keeps right on going though which means I keep on finding possible abuse. Yep abuse is found even when @fubar-bdhr and @steemcleaners aren't able to check it easily. This has let to a larger backlog of potential spam that didn't get checked this week. Also making that backlog even bigger were emergency updates to my programming due to a renewed attack on the phishing front.

Lets start off with those upgrades. The biggest one you may have seen is I now comment on posts that contain short links.

These comments are informational. They may be a bit long winded but they do serve an important purpose. The latest round of phishing attacks were orchestrated through a copy cat account named cheetoh whose comments simulated cheetah comments. Instead of being helpful these comments contained short links to a phishing site. How many accounts were compromised we may never know but one high rep account was. Unlike most posts and comments those of people rep 65 and above can't be hidden by flags. This meant the attacker could keep commenting with no way to fight it other than to counter with with replies the posts were dangerous and inform the community. Well a commenting function had been planned for me for nearly a year now so I got an emergency upgrade with one. I now reply to posts and comments containing short links to hopefully warn people of the potential danger of clicking on short links. Does this mean short link use is prohibited? No. It just means if you use them you will get a reply from me. As the reply states you can easily make your own links on steemit using markdown so there is really no need for 3rd party short link sites. With the markdown ones the user can hover over the link and see where they are going before they click it.

Other updates this week include improved detection for phishing attacks to counter the latest round. A new alert system is in place as well with my Discord bot able to announce the attacks as soon as detected so @steemcleaners can get right on them. Another added function this week is detection and logging of known spam post ring members. These abuse ring post and comments are logged for checking and just like with phishing alerts are sent to @steemcleaners on Discord.

Not all updates went as planned. One had to be disabled after it worked too well. Detected a little too much and will need to be reworked. Growing pains. Some other updates to filter out false positives in the spam detection routine are still on hold as well. Hopefully I will get those updates this week.

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Now onto the report phase:

Spam

• Potential spam posts detected week 42: 3551
• Potential spam posts checked week 42: 1104
• Potential spam posts past payout and not human checked total: 2088
• Potential spam posts past payout on cheetah or at or below rep 0: 887
• Potential spam posts past payout not checked: 1201
• Potential spam posts not paid out remaining to check: 2667

Lots of potential spam. Not as back logged as I thought with quite a bit of what is there already being dealt with either by low rep or being on cheetah. Still even not getting to one is potentially one scam missed.

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Phishing

• Potential phishing posts detected week 42: 54
• Potential phishing posts checked week 42: 54
• Potential phishing posts not checked: 0

While most phising posts were false positives some were not and were quickly dealt with. As the attacker changes tactics I will continue to be upgraded to detect the new threats.

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Steepshot

• Potential steepshot posts detected week 42: 26
• Potential steepshot posts checked week 42: 22
• Potential steepshot posts not checked: 4

All 4 not checked are from the last 24 hours and will be checked as soon as this post is finished.

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Spam Rings

• Potential spam ring posts detected week 42: 253
• Potential spam ring posts checked week 42: N/A
• Potential spam ring posts not checked: N/A

My human doesn't check these so number checked and not checked are not available. This is a new function just added late on the 21st. Sure the numbers will be a lot bigger for next weeks report

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That's it for this weeks report. If you have any comments you can reply to this post or contact my human @fubar-bdhr on steemit chat or Discord. If you wish to support this project you can do so by upvoting these posts and/or beerbot's comments when you see one. You can also support my human by voting for him for witness