It was bound to happen eventually, as the Bluesky social network enjoys growing success and approaches the 22 million user mark, malicious actors begin deploying scams on a large scale. Let’s take stock.
Crypto scams
BleepingComputera site often well informed on cybersecurity threats, has spotted cryptocurrency scams on Bluesky. On a publication dating from last week, we can see an AI-generated image which shows Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta touting “MetaCoin”. It goes without saying that the manager has nothing to do with this project and that his identity has been usurped.
Another message announces: “You Won $900,000 in FREE Bitcoin Satoshi”. It then leads to a page on the GitHub website which fortunately is no longer accessible at the time of writing.
Bluesky faces its success
In fact, there is nothing surprising to see malicious individuals trying to take advantage of the growing popularity of the social network. Recently, Bluesky’s security team published figures that show how tense the situation is:
In the last 24 hours, we received over 42,000 reports (an all-time high for a day). We receive approximately 3,000 reports per hour. To put this into context, over the entire year of 2023, we received 360,000 reports.
A very delicate mission, when we know that the platform currently only has around twenty employees, even if it also relies on automatic solutions and the (volunteer) work of Internet users to fill these limits.
Bluesky added on this subject: “With this large influx of users, we have also seen an increase in spam, scam and trolling activities. You may have already witnessed it yourself. Our team is reviewing these accounts and you can help us by reporting them by clicking on the three-dot menu on each post/account. »
The challenge of decentralization
As a reminder, Bluesky differs from its rival Twitter by its decentralized aspect based on the AT protocol. To simplify, the company behind the project controls the domains bsky.app and bsky.social, as well as the main server “BlueSky Social”. But, anyone can launch their own instance and manage it.
And precisely, BleepingComputer found that scams were more prevalent in these spaces managed by third parties. We will therefore have to monitor in the future whether we are not witnessing multi-speed moderation on the social network, with real difficulties ahead for users.
