Abstract—Live-streaming platforms increasingly turn real-time payments, including cheers, Bits, gifts, and highlighted chat, into public signals of status and support. This article examines anomalous cheering as a security problem across the full monetization pipeline, asking how unusual spikes in volume, value, timing, or attribution can be related to system assets, trust boundaries, and controls. We develop a reference data-flow model of a monetized cheering pipeline and apply Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, and Elevation of Privilege (STRIDE) to each system element across identity, payments, wallet and ledger services, event streaming, anomaly detection, and trust and safety operations. A simple ordinal Damage Potential, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected Users, and Discoverability (DREAD) rubric is used for prioritization, with a worked example showing how one spike can support several competing hypotheses. The analysis highlights five recurring risks: scalable identity abuse and account takeover, payment and ledger exploitation, replay or duplication of canonical events, latency-sensitive denial of service, and misuse of privileged detection or enforcement tools. The paper concludes that monetized cheering should be protected as an end-to-end pipeline, with safeguards placed at the relevant trust boundaries: server-side event generation, idempotency and replay resistance, adaptive throttling, graceful degradation, tamper-evident audit trails, privacy-aware measurement, and least-privilege operational access.
 
Keywords—threat modelling; Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, and Elevation of Privilege (STRIDE); Damage, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected Users, and Discoverability (DREAD); live streaming security; monetization fraud; anomaly detection; trust and safety


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