Steam game disappears after players accuse it of mining bitcoins on their computers [UPDATE]

In recent weeks, players of a PC platformer called Abstractism suspected something was wrong. The game has been accused of "cryptojacking" people's machines, or clandestinely using their resources to exploit for cryptocurrency. Today, after an uproar, Abstractism was removed from Steam

Abstractism appeared on Steam on March 15 and is presented as a "trivial platformer" which seemed innocent at first sight. But then the players noticed that this simple game on a box moving through a series of minimalist environments was making their CPU and their wheezing GPUs asking for irregular amounts of processing power. Steam critics, meanwhile, began to claim that the game had installed a virus disguised as Steam.exe.

After analyzing the malware in question, the players started to publish reviews and discussions saying that the game was using their machines. cryptocurrency mine. YouTuber SidAlpha (via Eurogamer ) took a closer look and came to the conclusion that it is probably a cryptojacking operation due to the structure of his system of Drop Steam, who plays the game for long periods. Cryptojacking, according to the security site CSO is difficult to reliably detect because of the way that hackers disguise outgoing communications, but a sure sign of it is a sudden drop in performance of the computer. The developer of Abstractism invented this technique for graphic sets

" Abstractism does not remove anything from crypto-currency", said the developer in response to a negative criticism published on July 13th. "Probably, you play on high graphics settings because they take a bit of CPU and GPU power, which is needed to render post-processing effects."

It is however worth repeating that the graphic style of the game was as simple as it gets. It seems strange that one of its graphical settings makes the PCs sweat. In addition, a speaker of SidAlpha's video, Matheus Muller, claimed to have analyzed the game by running it on a virtual machine – or emulation of a computer system – and found that "this use of resources is unrelated to the graphic rendering.Even when the game is not rendered or rendered by a separate GPU. "He also said that Abstractism " causes a tremendous amount of activity "network", which is pretty weird for a single platformer game.

The abstraction was also more obvious. One user reported that the game created a fraudulent article claiming to be a weapon Team Fortress 2 that sells for over $ 100 in the Steam market. He usurped the image and the name of the real object, but he did not actually give the players anything at stake. In fact, it was a fake list.

"I really did not think anything could be" replicated "like this," wrote the user on TF2 website Backpack TF . "I want you to not be stupid like me and watch out for this scam."

A game called Climber was recently removed from Steam after firing a similar scam with a high price DOTA 2 items.

Starting this afternoon, Abstractism is no longer available for sale on the Steam store. Kotaku reached out to Valve to find out why the game had been removed, but upon publication, the steward of all that Steam had yet to answer. [ Update – 9:30 pm, 07/30/18: Valve responded to our inquiry, saying that she "deleted Abstractism and banned her Steam developer to ship unauthorized code, trolling "]

Obviously, however, this still serves another clatter against Valve's decision to open more than ever the Steam valves.The company said that she would still refuse games that are "illegal or trolling", but if she can not consistently detect them before the damage is done, why should users expect a safe experience? on Steam?

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