Stealth Play Attack
A few weeks ago, a data leak rattled the online gaming community that targeted Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 online games. The source code of these games has been a hot topic on many social media portal that alarms many gamers not to play these online.
The exploitation was released initially on 4chan, an online bulletin board that anyone can leave comments and share information anonymously. From there, the code has now been available to different torrent download sites. For a gamer, this bleed on the game’s heart is not something to be neglected. Many malicious actors can easily embed a malware spyware program onto it. They could do a brute force hacking to any gamer’s console. With weak anti-malware protection, hackers can obtain vast information from many computers on any system. Due to this incident, most of the CS:GO and Team Fortress players avoid playing the game and just waited for the official update of the developer by giving warnings on social media and giving personal insights into the issue.
Valve really cannot blame their patrons for their behavior as an almost similar incident happened last year. A year ago, the Belonard malware was used in the Counter-Strike 1.6 game and was infected by it. The stealth attack on this play believed that 39% of the total game players for this community might have succumbed to the infection of the said malware. The worst part of the report was that the attack was supposed to be a Zero-Day vulnerability. It means no counter-measures or resolution are immediately available. Therefore, hackers exploited it while no one noticed it. As a result, massive data are compromised from any victim before any security program can be developed to stop it.
Moreover, not long after the leak was reported, Valve, the developer, confirmed that there is nothing to worry about it. They determined that the leaked source code was an old file that shared with many games and mod developers in 2017. The report further confirmed that the source code had been silently leaked in 2018, and no malicious report has been received until this year.
Valve heed to their players to be more vigilant and help them to apprehend the person responsible for the leakage for the community’s sake and security. Such an attack may be inevitable to happen in the future. Still, Valve may easily impede it since they are actively maintaining both games.
