Researchers Warn of Self-Spreading Malware Targeting Gamers via YouTube

Online Gaming is a platform that can give you the ability to sharpen your reasoning skills, calculated skills, and increase & enhance brain activities. If people had known earlier that making money with online gaming were as easy as now, then the money making process would have started a long time ago.

But due to more and more competition, people started ways that could make online gaming even easier and to cross those who are genuinely playing with their skills and according to the rules set in the online games. Just like that, an incident came in front about which we’ll talk about right now.

Players that were trying to get some cheat codes got into the traps of a malicious attack. Well, it was like as follow:

Method of adversaries was hiding the stealer-type malware while making a cover from game cheats, hacks, and cracks.

Event started when Gamers started looking for game cheats on YouTube, and became the target of Cyber Attack.

In that case, they (online gamers) got the links that were supposed to be helping in rogue password-protected archive files.

The reality of those links were that they were customized to make the user install Crypto Miners and Data Stealing Malware as RedLine Stealer on victimized machines.

Well, after downloading the self-extracting RAR archive files, Redline Stealer got executed on the devices.

Other than Redline Stealer (coin miner) several other binaries were also executed. Due to that the self-propagation of those things got enabled.

For this attack, an open-source (C# based) password stealer was used to extract cookies from browsers.

After that, it was used to get unauthorized access to the victim’s YouTube Account and upload the video. In the video, a link was also provided that had the malicious archive.

After the successful upload of the video on the victim’s YouTube Account, one of the executables in the archive sends a message to Discord with a link to the uploaded video.

This incident seems like any other online gaming attack that happens on a daily basis to target a bigger audience. But something made it into a big event. Data stimulated from July 1, 2021 – June 30, 2022 counted the victims who got trapped in gaming-related malware and unknown software approx 3,85,000.

In those attacks, 91,000 files were shared while imitating as:

Minecraft

1. Roblox
2. Need for Speed
3. Grand Theft Auto
4. Call of Duty

Oleg Kupreev, Kaspersky Security Researcher, Kupreev Pro

“The videos advertise cheats and cracks and provide instructions on hacking popular games and software,”

There were many games that became the target of the malicious attack, and those are as follows:

“Cybercriminals actively hunt for gaming accounts and gaming computer resources,” Kupreev said. “Stealer-type malware is often distributed under the guise of game hacks, cheats, and cracks. All this is further proof if any were needed, that illegal software should be treated with extreme caution.”

Advice

Even if you’re trying to pass the level of games via cheat codes or whatever you may get from unknown sources, you must check that they shouldn’t have gotten into a trap of malicious attackers. More importantly, you should never download something from an unknown, unresponsive, or suspicious site/ link. Learn, Research, and Grow!

Kindly read more articles :

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Sandhyakumari

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