Major Game of the Year Targeted by Malware Attack, Compromising Players’ PCs

Meccha Chameleon has emerged as this year’s unexpected blockbuster, racking up over 15 million sales in less than a month and becoming a viral sensation. However, recent developments surrounding the game have taken a troubling turn.

Last week, an independent researcher named Feint uncovered that hackers had embedded viruses in certain user-created maps on Steam Workshop. When players launched community maps like Laser Tag Neon, an invisible command prompt would activate, downloading harmful software. This type of attack is known as a malware dropper, specifically installing a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) on affected systems, allowing attackers to remotely control compromised PCs. Feint advised players who engaged with these maps to conduct a thorough malware scan immediately and to check their Documents and temporary folders for any suspicious .bat files.

Following Feint’s blog post, the Laser Tag Neon map was taken down, but other infected maps, such as Chroma Grid Arena, quickly surfaced. In response, the developers, lemorion_1224 and Haganeiro, released version 3.1.0 to patch the vulnerability. Unfortunately, during the process of addressing the hack, the developers’ PC became infected, allowing a hacker to seize control of Meccha Chameleon’s Discord server, which boasts 100,000 members.

“While fixing the issue of malware embedded in a MOD map, a system engineer’s PC got infected with malware,” an update from lemorion_1224 stated. “After that, the hacker bypassed the engineer’s two-factor authentication on Discord, altered the server permissions, and banned all the staff members.” The compromised PC has since been wiped clean, preventing any further edits to the game’s files or the introduction of additional exploits. “The perpetrator who hijacked the Discord is likely to issue various statements moving forward, so please refrain from clicking any suspicious links or following any dubious instructions they provide.”

Just a few hours ago, the developers regained access to the channel after reaching out to Discord. “All hackers who had become admins have been fully banned. The server’s highest privilege account has been changed to a different one from the hijacked account, so it is safe.” This morning, the developers rolled out update 3.3.1, which “further strengthened virus protection.”

It remains unclear how many users were impacted by these issues, but the exploit may have been present for a while. A Steam review from July 8 noted: “Game poses a super severe security risk. A friend of mine hosting a game had his computer hacked and someone was trying to take control of his system while we were playing.” While the authenticity of this review hasn’t been verified, the symptoms described align closely with the virus’s behavior.

Although the virus primarily affected players accessing custom maps and seems to have been resolved, this isn’t the first instance of Steam games being compromised by malware. Just two months ago, a free horror game was removed for stealing user data and cryptocurrency. Several similar incidents have led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the matter, even creating a webpage to gather information.

Like Prop Hunt with more artistic flair.