Fortnite Cheats Get Pwned by Malware-Infected V-Bucks App

Fortnite is currently the most popular game in the world and addresses a wide range of players, young and old. However, its immense popularity also means that it is often the target of malware writers and scammers. This has become evident in recent weeks by Rainway CEO Andrew Sampson.

Sampson writes in a blog post that his company began tracking "hundreds of thousands of error reports" as of June 26 via its online gaming streaming platform. The errors concerned calls to different advertising platforms according to Sampson, which was special since Rainway has no ads.

"We immediately ruled out that we had been compromised one way or another and started to see malicious adware attacking those users," said Sampson. "As errors continued to pour in, we took a look at what these users had in common: they did not share any hardware, their ISPs were different, and all their systems were up-to-date. they played Fortnite. "

After doing some additional research, it was discovered that an application download claiming to provide Fortnite players with free V-Bucks and an aimbot to hit targets with skill was the culprit of the error messages. Once installed, the software is able to successfully run a man in the middle attack (MiTM) by broadcasting an adware via a victim's system and modifying the page requests to add a beacon for the Adtelligent advertising service

Rainway then attempted to file an abuse report for the wrongful application with its web host, and the file was "promptly removed". However, at that time, the damage had already been done. The application has been downloaded over 78,000 times by Fortnite players seeking to take over the millions of other players around the world.

When all was said and done, Rainway received over 380,000 reports of errors regarding this Fortnite malware.

"While this should be self-evident, I think you should not download random programs because if something is too good to be true, you will probably need to reformat your PC," Sampson continues. He does not dismiss Epic Games from blame, writing: "Epic could better inform its users about these malicious programs and help them understand how Fortnite's hermetic systems prevent cheating."