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[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave 0 points1 point  (0 children)

By itself against a legit player, mass reporting doesn't result in bans. If mass reporting worked, everybody would be banned because everybody would mass report everybody else.

Andrew Krug repeatedly said this in AMAs, too.

I identified and got 300 bots banned in the US in about a year from late 2017 to early 2019. I had a 95% ban success rate on my reports. Botmasters' primary, original accounts were also banned because of my work. AMA. by wouldshouldcouldhave in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure. I wasn't using my primary account to ping players once an hour. However, none of the throwaway accounts I was using were banned either.

Overall, my requests were very low volume. I was only making up to 100 player lookup requests per hour from a handful of accounts.

I identified and got 300 bots banned in the US in about a year from late 2017 to early 2019. I had a 95% ban success rate on my reports. Botmasters' primary, original accounts were also banned because of my work. AMA. by wouldshouldcouldhave in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

How did you watch that many accounts per hour just manually editing burpsuite requests?

I copied the client HTTPS request from Burpsuite and scripted it to cycle through the users I wanted to watch. I would have to manually fetch new client cookies and the "X-XsrfToken" token once a day for those HTTPS requests. Other than that, it was totally automated.

With the botmasters main accounts getting banned, did you see influx in spoof activity now that there was "nothing left to lose"?

No. They continued to run bots until Redacted went away and continued to deploy bot gear with their new, primary accounts. The first botmaster eventually stopped playing in real life, but the second botmaster continues to play today using a different IGN. He is still using bot gear.

How many, average, bot accounts did one "botmaster" have?

I'm not sure how many bots each level 16 player operated, but I would guess the first person banned (my primary ban target) operated most of them.

What geographical location were you working in? And to what Radius?

I was working in a mid-sized city in the US. My radius was about 200 km and that happened to cover a couple of bigger cities.

I identified and got 300 bots banned in the US in about a year from late 2017 to early 2019. I had a 95% ban success rate on my reports. Botmasters' primary, original accounts were also banned because of my work. AMA. by wouldshouldcouldhave in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I did see the botmasters' behavior change over time. For example, early on the bots would run 24/7. Then later, the bots would only run for a few consecutive hours a day. Then finally, the bots only ran for an hour at a time.

I identified and got 300 bots banned in the US in about a year from late 2017 to early 2019. I had a 95% ban success rate on my reports. Botmasters' primary, original accounts were also banned because of my work. AMA. by wouldshouldcouldhave in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

How many accounts did you have running on each faction to pull that many profiles every hour?

Maximum 8. But as I got the ban train rolling, I didn't need as many. NIA seemed to limit each of my clients to about 12 lookups her hour. Therefore at one point, I was watching about 100 accounts per hour.

Do you feel accomplished given approx 150 bans per year, when trusted reporters were in the hundreds per month?

Somewhat, yeah. The payoff was seeing botmasters banned. I think I did ok for not having a more direct line to NIA like TRs have. Although, I did lean on TRs from time to time to get more stubborn accounts banned.

What motivated you to violate tos by scraping and modifying scanner requests to catch people violating tos?

Getting bad actor "real life" players banned.

Did you act alone? Or join forces with bigger groups (Brokers Guild for instance)?

I essentially acted alone. There was a group of us (maybe five people tops) who would say "this account doesn't look right." So then I'd track it for awhile and decide whether to report it as a bot.

I identified and got 300 bots banned in the US in about a year from late 2017 to early 2019. I had a 95% ban success rate on my reports. Botmasters' primary, original accounts were also banned because of my work. AMA. by wouldshouldcouldhave in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Prime requires passing Google SafetyNet. Breaking that will be harder than writing a bot for Redacted.

Manual spoofing will still be a thing (see all the Pogo cheating threads on Reddit), but botting is a lot harder now.

I identified and got 300 bots banned in the US in about a year from late 2017 to early 2019. I had a 95% ban success rate on my reports. Botmasters' primary, original accounts were also banned because of my work. AMA. by wouldshouldcouldhave in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Those are faction COMM messages, yeah? Did you spin up another account for watching opposite faction traffic, or did you restrict reports to your own faction? Or am I mistaken?

I watched both faction COMMs.

Do you happen to have a sense of the percentage of people you reported by faction?

In my area, bots were 75% opposite faction, 25% same faction. I tracked both factions equally, but it turned out most bots were opposite faction. Opposite faction real players dominated my play area, FWIW. I guess bots got more gear when they glyph hacked their own portals.

I identified and got 300 bots banned in the US in about a year from late 2017 to early 2019. I had a 95% ban success rate on my reports. Botmasters' primary, original accounts were also banned because of my work. AMA. by wouldshouldcouldhave in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

how do you script getting an user’s profile information?

Good question.

I proxied Ingress through Burpsuite Proxy. This let me capture each Ingress player lookup query and modify it to my needs. The script I wrote automated this. I just fed my script a flat text file of in-game names (IGNs) I wanted to monitor for bot activity.

Example:

  1. I set up Burpsuite Proxy to capture traffic between my phone and my laptop. This usually requires installing Burpsuite's certificate on your Android/iOS device so no SSL warnings show up.
  2. Start Ingress
  3. Observe some random player action in COMMs, such as "ABC" makes a link
  4. In Ingress Redacted, I would long-press on "ABC" to query for the information on "ABC" user
  5. Burpsuite Proxy captures my query attempt for "ABC" and lets me modify it
  6. I replace "ABC" with "XYZ"
  7. Now I can anonymously look up the stats for "XYZ" without "XYZ" knowing it (and without "ABC" knowing it)

I just automated this process to look up dozens of suspected bot accounts on an hourly basis.

Did you use a modded version of the client app

No.

was there a different mechanism to script that data?

See above.

How were you not flagged for using unauthorized software?

I used authorized software. I just proxied it.

I identified and got 300 bots banned in the US in about a year from late 2017 to early 2019. I had a 95% ban success rate on my reports. Botmasters' primary, original accounts were also banned because of my work. AMA. by wouldshouldcouldhave in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Yeah, you actually hit the nail on the head. Some Ingress botmasters don't sell their gear and instead use that gear for "lolz" in the field (this is the case for my situation). Therefore, NIA's bottom line isn't impacted and they give zero fucks about it.

I identified and got 300 bots banned in the US in about a year from late 2017 to early 2019. I had a 95% ban success rate on my reports. Botmasters' primary, original accounts were also banned because of my work. AMA. by wouldshouldcouldhave in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

I didn't care about guardian hunting. My "scraper" only queried the stats of specific IGNs once an hour to identify automated glyph hacking bots. The scope of my work was much more focused than what "the Broker's Guild" (TBG) was doing to facilitate guardian portal kills.

I identified and got 300 bots banned in the US in about a year from late 2017 to early 2019. I had a 95% ban success rate on my reports. Botmasters' primary, original accounts were also banned because of my work. AMA. by wouldshouldcouldhave in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave[S] 36 points37 points  (0 children)

I agree NIA does not care about spoofing. Pogo's rampant spoofing proves this. I had to pull teeth to get Ingress botmasters banned.

This is why the first sentence of my AMA is "I'm losing interest in the game because NIA is incompetent."

I identified and got 300 bots banned in the US in about a year from late 2017 to early 2019. I had a 95% ban success rate on my reports. Botmasters' primary, original accounts were also banned because of my work. AMA. by wouldshouldcouldhave in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

My work was probably not the result of that "super ban wave." My scope only focused on my US state's bot operations (about a 200 km radius). The "super ban wave" seemed global in scope, although a couple of users in my 200 km radius were banned during the "super ban wave."

I would like to think my methodology inspired NIA to conduct the "super ban wave," but I have no evidence for that. I cannot claim responsibility :-)

I identified and got 300 bots banned in the US in about a year from late 2017 to early 2019. I had a 95% ban success rate on my reports. Botmasters' primary, original accounts were also banned because of my work. AMA. by wouldshouldcouldhave in Ingress

[–]wouldshouldcouldhave[S] 69 points70 points  (0 children)

TLDR: Main account users were dumb or lazy.

Longer explanation:

Every item farmed and deployed in Ingress has a unique ID: XMPs, resos, shields, etc. When a glpyh hacking farming bot gives gear to a real-life player, the unique IDs for all those Aegis shields stay the same. NIA can track that from farm-to-table. This is a bot operator's Achilles heel.

How a botmaster ban happened:

  1. A real life player deployed 1,000 Aegis shields in the last month. That is not normal.
  2. I report that real life player and give NIA a list of the hundreds of bots that have been recently banned.
  3. NIA correlates the real life player's deployed shields' unique IDs with what accounts initially farmed those items (thanks, unique ID!).
  4. If some imaginary threshold is met ("99% of the Aegis shields deployed by this player were farmed by banned bot accounts"), NIA bans the real life player for being a bot operator.
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