New Malware Targets Fortnite Cheaters

In an unusual twist, those gamers downloading hacks for Fortnite may be in danger of downloading malware. Fortnite, the super-popular battle royale game, is quite competitive, and some less-scrupulous players opt to download cheating scripts. Such scripts give them an unfair edge, doing things like aiming for them or altering their screen’s heads-up display. These cheaters are clearly making the experience worse for others, but they seem to be getting a comeuppance.

Fortnite Cheaters Drowning in Malware

The malware was detected by a company called Rainway. Rainway is a remote streaming service that allows its users to play games while away from their computers. The company’s traffic enforces whitelisting, only connecting to URLs that have been given an official go-ahead. As such, the malware, which was redirecting ad traffic to different servers, caught their attention, as did the common denominator behind them. All of the players who were experiencing these errors were Fortnite players!

By narrowing it down, Rainway was able to quickly discern that the malware in question came from a specific aim-bot hack. According to a report by Ars Technica, the malware acted as a man-in-the-middle attack, which would begin hosting ads from adtelligent.com and springserve.com. The attacks would cut off legitimate ads and run the ones hosted on the aforementioned sites. Rainway informed the site that was providing the Fortnite hack, as well as Adtelligent and Sringserve. The site hosting the hack took it down, and Springserve helped purge the hosted ads. Adtelligent had no comment, nor did Epic, the company that makes Fortnite.

The Moral of the Story

An easy way to avoid viruses like this is to not download anything from sketchy websites. Running scripts from cheat-hosting websites is like inviting strangers into your house: you don’t know what they’ll do with your stuff. While cheaters are jerks for trying to get an unfair advantage, we don’t want anyone having their computers ruined by viruses. So, be smart, don’t cheat at video games, and don’t download sketchy hacks! This malware wasn’t even that disruptive. The next one might not be so generous!