Fortnite Cheaters Accidentally Gave Themselves Malware
It was a case of justice being immediately served as players attempting to get ahead in Fortnite accidentally infected their PCs.
78,000 Fortnite players tried to cheat with aimbots, but instead they downloaded malware to their systems.
Employees of Rainway, a game streaming app, noticed suspicious activity on their platform the morning of June 26th.
Their servers were getting error messages related to advertisements, which was a red flag because Rainway has no advertisements.
After some detective work, Rainway noticed that the 78,000 users responsible for the error reports had one thing in common – they all played Fortnite.
In an attempt to figure out why only Fortnite players were generating the advert related error reports, Rainway checked out a few YouTube videos that offered ways to cheat in the popular game.
“We finally found a match in a hack claiming to allow players to generate free V-Bucks and use an aimbot, two birds with one stone, how could someone resist?”
Sure enough, the infected Fortnite players downloaded the program that claimed to be a free V-Bucks generator and an aimbot all in one. Of course, the program was just malware. Rainway describes how the hack works:
“We then spun up a virtual machine and ran the hack, it immediately installed a root certificate on the device and changed Windows to proxy all web traffic through itself. A successful Man in the Middle Attack.”
A ‘Man in the Middle’ attack is when your data is secretly routed through a third-party location, instead of going direct to the source.
If you are worried about your PC getting infected, the simple solution is to not cheat and you should be fine.
Rainway would like to see Epic take a stronger stance against cheating and put more of an effort in removing YouTube scam videos.
“Epic could do a better job at educating their users on these malicious programs and helping them understand how airtight Fortnite’s systems are at preventing cheating. I’d also recommend they spend more time moderating YouTube to help take down these videos to avert a countless number of people from pwning themselves. Sometimes the allure of cheating is powerful, and a strong presence is needed to help push people in the right direction.”
Source: Rainway Blog