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A mysterious group of cybercriminals has released an infostealer targeting gamers who cheat in video games, stealing their bitcoin holdings and impacting hundreds of thousands of players.
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Game developer Activision Blizzard is working with cheat providers to help the affected players.
Video game cheaters may have finally met their match as a mysterious group of cybercriminals has reportedly released an information stealer malware targeting gamers who cheat in Call of Duty, stealing the bitcoin {{BTC}} holdings of some players.
The malware has already impacted hundreds of thousands of players and the numbers are still growing, as per malware market informer @vxunderground.
“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.”
Over the past couple of days we have become aware of malware targeting gamers! More specifically, a currently unidentified Threat Actor is utilizing an infostealer to target individuals who cheat (Pay-to-Cheat) in video games.
A Call of Duty cheat provider (PhantomOverlay) was…
— vx-underground (@vxunderground) March 27, 2024
Call of Duty cheat code provider “PhantomOverlay” was first to notice the suspicious activity after users reported unauthorized purchases. Rival cheat providers like Elite PVPers confirmed similar attacks to @vxunderground in the past week.
The stolen data includes freshly stolen credentials, with some victims also reporting their Electrum wallets were also drained. The total amount of crypto stolen is still unknown.
Call of Duty developer Activision Blizzard (ATVI) is reportedly working with the cheat code providers to help the affected players. The current estimated number of compromised accounts includes over 3.6 million Battlenet accounts, 561,000 Activision accounts, and 117,000 Elite PVPers accounts.
Meanwhile, PhantomOverlay claimed the number of hacked accounts “are inflated” in a Telegram broadcast message on Wednesday.
Exploiters have targeted game cheaters for years. In 2018, a supposed cheat for the massively popular video game Fortnite turned out to be malware designed to steal bitcoin wallet login details. Fortnite players were again targeted in 2019, with hackers blocking access to a user’s entire computer data.