Fireworks or Fortnite?
It's a tough call for a lot of Fortnite players on the Fourth of July who hate to put their game controllers down.
Fortnite is an addicting craze that has made it the current number one video game in the world, and some players suffer from the newly designated Gaming Disorder.
All over the web, you'll find promises of Fortnite hacks, tricks, and cheats, including free V-bucks, which is the game's digital currency.
These cheats are often just providing cover for cybercrime, like distributors of malware that want access to your computer or device.
Tens of thousands download malicious Fortnite cheat
In fact, red flags went up at video game streaming company Rainway.io in June 2018, when it noticed tens of thousands of Fortnite players using its service had become infected with the same exact virus.
A virus that popped up seemingly at once, like a flu outbreak in winter.
"We ruled out immediately that we had been compromised in some way and began to see malicious adware was attacking these users. Usually, we’d brush this off, one user being infected isn’t all that surprising, but user after user we saw a trend happening, and we could only ask, what was the source?"
That is Rainway's CEO, Andrew Sampson, who wrote an extensive blog post about what the company did to find the infection source. Because infected players were on differing devices, operating systems, and ISPs, there had to be something else to what they were seeing.
Where was the Fortnite virus coming from?
"We downloaded hundreds of programs, all claiming to do something to help a player get ahead. While they were all indeed malicious, we were looking for a specific one. We created a small utility to help us sift through all these programs to find references to the URLs we were detecting through error logging. After hours of painstaking searching, we struck oil."
Oil, Sampson says, in the form of data that identified the source of the virus: a cheat promising free V-bucks and a free aimbot as well.
What is an aimbot? According to Computer Hope, it's another way to cheat.
"An aimbot is a software tool used in first-person shooting games that allows the player to shoot enemies without having to aim their weapon. Because this helps the player shoot more accurately with less skill, it is considered cheating."
And since the goal in Fortnite is to be the lone survivor in a 100-player gaming session, being able to kill your enemy with less skill is very attractive.
And infectious, it turns out. Rainway says it detected 78,000 downloads of this particular malicious cheat, which it reported and had removed.
Video game industry needs to educate players on cybersecurity
If this is just one of an endless stream of infected cheats, what can be done to stop the spread of these viruses?
Sampson says Epic Games, Fortnite's creator, could and should do more:
"Epic could do a better job at educating their users on these malicious programs and helping them understand how airtight Fortnites 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."
Hopefully, these gamers are also getting pushed in the direction of a career in cybersecurity, because a recent study found that gamers may be your best infosec hire.
