Catch the fraud — with observability and analytics
summary
Elastic’s contributor program runs on Kubernetes, Spring Boot, Spring Data and Elasticsearch and gets swamped after MacBook prizes lead to ~7 million requests (over 3 million from Brazil). Observability surfaces ~8 million hits on the validate endpoint in 15 days, revealing bots that auto-click approvals, a race condition giving 4–5 approvals instead of 3, username+number families, single-IP sockpuppets, and one account claiming 49 referrals. Responses include thresholds (max 10 submissions/day), anomaly detection and manual validation; full automation remains unresolved.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:40The contributor program
- 3:50Analytics
- 6:56How to cheat
- 10:13Automated validation
- 12:11disqualification
- 14:00same name
- 15:03referral program
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