A shadowy group of cybercriminals has allegedly created an information stealer virus that targets players who cheat in Call of Duty, potentially taking some players’ bitcoin (BTC) holdings. This suggests that video game cheaters may have finally met their match.According to malware market informer @vxunderground, the virus has already affected hundreds of thousands of players, and the number is still rising.
“It should be noted that some of these accounts are also not cheaters,” @vxunderground added. “Some users impacted utilized gaming software for latency improvement, VPNs, and certain controller boosting software.”
After consumers reported making unlawful transactions, “PhantomOverlay,” a distributor of Call of Duty cheat codes, became aware of the suspicious conduct first.Similar attacks to @vxunderground have been confirmed by other cheat providers, such as Elite PVPers, in the last week.In addition to recently obtained credentials, some victims also claim that their Electrum wallets were empty.It’s still unclear how much cryptocurrency was taken in total.
Activision Blizzard (ATVI), the company behind Call of Duty, is apparently collaborating with the suppliers of cheat codes to assist the impacted gamers.As of right now, it is anticipated that approximately 3.6 million Battlenet accounts, 561,000 Activision accounts, and 117,000 Elite PVPers accounts have been compromised.In the meantime, PhantomOverlay asserted in a Telegram broadcast message on Wednesday that the quantity of compromised accounts “is inflated.”
For years, gaming cheats have been the focus of exploiters.2018 saw the discovery that a purported trick for the wildly popular video game Fortnite was actually malware used to steal login credentials for bitcoin wallets.2019 saw hackers attack Fortnite players once more, preventing them from accessing any data on their computers.