We act on your reports

I have been reporting for years. I decided that it's time to mention this threat vector.
Considering that this SEO spam has doubled over the past few weeks, this report had to be published for the community.
You have kept denying that a single hacker (or a few hackers) is behind it and that all these accounts come from genuine users.

There is no secret conspiracy of thousands of users that got together secretly to spam Hive with SEO, uniquely choosing the Ecency free account service (while there have been many other different free account services).

There's no SEO incentive

There was for years. This SEO spam reaches as far as 2023 at least. Your SEO indexing block was only implemented a few months ago.

It makes no difference, because very likely the hacker is unaware of your block implementation or doesn't care. Once the botnet script was let loose a few years ago, it just keeps running. I am sure that the hacker's bot also runs on other social media.

"Hacked" is wrong.

This is unauthorised access. With the script, the free account creation service is hacked. Fake accounts are being created to get access to the Hive ecosystem's content creation service and exploit it for personal gain.

Considering that many backlinks may be phishing links, it is a cybersecurity threat hack.

Since the hacker has control over all these accounts and control is automated, it is a botnet. Just because the hacker hasn't used it yet to publish more than 1 post/comment per account, it could easily activate the whole group of thousands of accounts to spam the chain with AI publications.

On our controls

VPN check detection may not work if the hacker leases IP addresses or rotates them using cheap VPS providers.

There is a super basic auto CAPTCHA. All it requires is to tick the mark.

I have just created an account within 1 second after clicking a button to sign up.

One clarification

I have been manually checking every single Ecency-created account for the past 6 months.
The rate was more or less 70-80% SEO spam during that time, and became >90% SEO spam in the past few weeks. IT's not jsut the fact that over 90% of Ecency accounts are SEO Spam, but also the number of them of them have doubled over the past few weeks.

If a gap is still open, the fastest path to closing it is the channel where you were reporting weekly, this post doesn’t help

The community needs to be aware of the problem that has been going on for so long. Hence this post.