The Social Network Doling Out Millions In Ephemeral Money

Its founders say Steemit will attract users by rewarding them for behaviors that other social media companies, like Reddit and Facebook, use. Steem, the cryptocurrency, is intertwined with the decentralized social media networking site Steemit.com. These elements are very similar to other social media sites. The difference with these cryptocurrency based social platforms is they expose community interaction elements to social engineers who will take advantage of the abundance of Open Source Information (OSI) available to them, to leverage against users. Steemit, a nascent social media platform, is trying to change all that by rewarding its users with cold, hard cash in the form of a cryptocurrency. For Steemit, because it is a full-fledged social platform, I predict an abnormally high level of fraud, scams, phishing, and other manner of social engineering attempts, as compared to other cryptocurrency ventures without deep social interactions. Although I believe cybercriminals will relentlessly target Steemit’s social platform, the platform has several positive security aspects. In addition, it must also cope with the pressure of being a work-in-progress social media site and the likely behavioral attacks which will leverage communication aspects of this platform.

This enables them to conduct Man-in-the-Middle attacks to steal credentials or falsify transactions. Successful attacks can give complete control of systems, access to accounts, lock out legitimate users, destroy reputations, and steal intellectual property and financial assets. In short, a blogger can earn cryptocurrency by authoring content that is voted up by other members of the community. Malicious sites can push malware and legitimate sites can be hijacked as can ads appearing on them. Phishing is likely to include bad links within posts, directing users to sites with malware or to legitimate sites on which ads have been compromised to push malware to visitors. There are already reports of users receiving emails which look like legitimate requests from administrators. There are many risks with this approach. There are two ways of earning Steem. Although this innovative platform pays users to participate, the front-end social media web portal opens new avenues for cybercriminals that are not present in most other cryptocurrencies. Scott, a former financial analyst, was fascinated by the economics that drive cryptocurrencies. We spoke with Ned Scott, a co-founder of Steemit, the company that created the social network and the cryptocurrency, about that question via phone recently.

So does user ownership result in a better social network? The way to beat them, the way to make a better future for everyone, is public data,” he said. Would it make the internet better? But in order to make it work, they needed a way to hold people accountable. Unlike Bitcoin, there’s no messing around with coin traders or triple-checking long, fiddly strings of letters and numbers to make sure you’re not accidentally sending your money to a Nigerian prince. For the first time, there’s an opportunity cost to trolling,” says the cofounder. All of the characters in the game had the ability to cast spells, and they had ‘mana’ they could use,” he says. Tsu promised to be an ad supported social network, like Facebook, but one that paid out 90 percent of its income to its users and supporters. Users should keep this in mind. They have proposed a structure in which users would identify trusted individuals to take part in multisignature oversight and recovery systems.

Users have a social profile which is tied to the open blockchain, as is all the content. What if the people who made social networks great owned those social networks? The people / United / Will never then be quieted. Then I posted just four sentences, along with a copy of an angry letter that Phil Collins once sent me about a concert review I had written. An emerging sector is the convergence with social media platforms. To remain safe and trustworthy, the platforms must be designed with great features to enhance security. Being able to conduct research on who has considerable wealth and what topics they are interested in, write about, upvote, or comment on, is a big advantage for social engineering criminals. Under this weighted model, individuals who have contributed the most to the platform have greater influence over how other contributions are scored—which creates a snowballing effect.