The Keep Guardian — Why?

The Keep team temporarily shut down Slack invitations in order to add an extra layer of security. Learn more about why we built the Keep Guardian.

This is the first story in a two part series. Interested in the technical details of how we built the Keep Guardian? Stay on the lookout for the next post in the series.

What is it?

The Keep Guardian for Slack is an Autobot that runs behind the scenes in our Slack chat room to keep an eye on things.

Well, almost but not exactly.

Since Slack isn’t the most secure social platform, we need a way to automate tasks that look for scammers phishing for their next victim. That’s what our Keep Guardian does; it’s a bot that is controlled programmatically, with OAuth 2.0 granting it accesses to Slack’s API. We have also configured MetaCert to work in tandem with our bot for added anti-phishing protection.

What it’s not

Unlike chatbots that were designed to hold conversations with a human, but often only succeed in being annoying, the Keep Guardian works quietly, monitoring our Slack channels for suspicious activity.

Instead of carrying on a lengthy conversation or pretending to be human, our Guardbot silently watches and waits for scammers. It then renders them inactive and notifies our community of what happened.

Why we built it

Many projects like us in the blockchain space are using Slack as a tool to build and connect with their community and followers. It has great features like sharing content, answering questions, and getting to know our supporters.

Though it provides easy collaboration and communication, Slack is missing security features that are needed in a cryptocurrency-based community. As the tool works today, anybody can send unmonitored private messages to any other user. For example, as the tool works today, anyone can send unmonitored private messages to another user, meaning that a scammer could impersonate a team member at Keep and make a phishing attempt.

We built the Keep Guardian to help protect against the scammers and phishing attacks all too common in this industry.

Twitter Scammers

Good examples of common phishing attempts are the numerous people posing as Vilalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum and Bitcoin Magazine) on Twitter.

Here are a few examples:

The above examples and many other phishing attempts have a few things in common:

Promise to send a lot of ETH in return for a little

Provide a crypto address to receive your funds

Appear to be legitimate

With the Keep Guardian, we’re putting measures into place so these similar types of scams won’t happen within our Slack community. We monitor for crypto addresses across all public and private conversations to keep members of our community protected.

How it keeps our community safe

First, let’s look at what happens from an end-user’s perspective. In the next article, we’ll look at the technical aspects of how the Keep Guardian was built and how it works.

Kicks scammers out

Here’s our scammer (lex.ttc2) trying to fool everyone on the #random channel into sending .5 ETH in return for 10 ETH:

Mere moments after the bogus message is posted, our Keep Guardian bot jumps into action issuing a warning for everyone on that channel to see, immediately after the scammer’s message.

Here’s the scammer’s Slack client as he gets notified …

… and disabled:

The scammer will remain disabled unless they can contact a site administrator and can convince them to re-enable their account.

This is what everyone other than the scammer sees:

This is what’s sent to the #general channel:

Note: Our #general channel is called #keep in our production Slack environment.

Secures the Keep Team’s flair

Our bot is busy ensuring that we can trust what we see in our Slack channel. Only Keep Core Team members are permitted to change their user status emoji to the Keep “K”.

Keep Flair (user status emoji)

Catches scammers when they try to reconnect

Just in case our busy bot took a nap (or had been offline) allowing a scammer to use the Keep flair, our bot will catch that scammer the next time he tries to connect to our Slack channel.

Protects topic and purpose in designated channels

As with other offenses, scammers caught attempting to modify the topic or purpose of protected channels will be “handled”.

Summary

We built the Keep Guardian because, although Slack is a good tool, it is designed for fundamentally different use cases than what cryptocurrency communities use it for.

We care about protecting our community and we wanted to give ya’ll a peek into how things get built here. You — and your safety — are important to us. We look forward to working with you once the Keep Network launches.

— Lex Sheehan

Also, checkout my book on functional programming and Go.

Learn More

For more information about the Keep Network: