Downvoting Attack On Steemit To Raise Articles to Front Page

Steemit has been the subject of many hack attempts due to its massive success. Drawing the attention of malicious attackers is one of the side-effects of becoming successful. Everything is hackable with enough time and energy put towards it. Social engineering attacks are some of the worst attacks and some of the most damaging, because they use psychological methods rather than pure code-based attacks.

In the most recent line, we have what seems to be a "Downvoting-attack". This essentially is someone aggressively downvoting articles and the comments within the articles to keep the user's content from getting to the front page.

This attack will not only inflict short term damage on the user's article, psychologically it will deter users from returning to the platform.

The downvote attack must be prevented and aggressively paid attention to in order for that not to become a major source of user-exodus at some point. Facebook users are experiencing platform-fatigue, and are looking for something new. If Steemit encounters too many problems during the Beta, it will surely benefit the social media platform that waited to learn and observe from all the attacks on Steemit, and thus how to react.

Steemit can beat those platforms if it just makes sure to be proactive against malicious attackers, and simultaneously highly reactive in attack scenarios.

Thus far, their performance has been exemplary as far as I can tell.

Keep up the good work!

Chris Bates
Chief Security Officer
Bitland Global