On 31st July, a game named Abstractism was removed from one of the video game platforms due to claims of crypto-mining activity. Abstractism had over 6000 users who purchased it from ‘Steam’ since its launch in mid-March.
On ‘Crappy Games Wikipedia’, where it has been listed as a below average game, the reasons for it to sub-par are poor controls, bad graphics, over-priced game items and the presence of a cryptocurrency mining virus.
Soon after its launch, gamers began complaining that it acted like a crypto-jacker. The game was very computer-heavy which was strange, given that the features of the game were very low tech. Further suspicions began to arise when Okalo Union, the developer of the game, encouraged users to keep the game running continuously and finally there was always an issue with the game frequently triggering the anti-virus.
Initially, the game did gain attention due to the feature of selling knockoff items since it has been bootlegged into a famous game known as ‘Team Fortress 2’.
The malware was first uncovered when a gamer reported that he had been cheated when he traded a valuable item for a fake ‘Strange Australium Rocket Launcher’.
After further investigation, it was found that Abstractism had made a virtual copy of the real item and stuck it on top of their own items. Another investigation suggested that most of the items on the game were useless.
In response, Steam removed the game and a spokesperson stated that they have evacuated Abstractism and restricted its designer from Steam for delivering unapproved code, trolling with content, and defrauding clients with beguiling in-amusement things.
A Twitterati posted saying:
“Abstractism has finally been pulled from the steam store. Hopefully, Valve puts in measures to mitigate the inevitable slew of similar games that are going to try the same shit.”
This wasn’t the first game to have suffered from a mining malware, a few weeks ago, popular internet game, League of Legends was infected by the notorious Monero mining malware. In this case, mining took place in the background without the knowledge of the gamers and without alerting the system. Both these games run continuously in the background for hours once the game is launched on the computer.
In both the cases, it is still very unclear as to how much mining has already taken place.
Furthermore, Monero mining also claimed another victim back in 2017, when Digimine, a Monero mining software infected the chrome version of Facebook messenger which was reported in not more than 7 countries.
In March, $75,000 worth of XMR tokens were mined from ordinary house computers through a virus known as ‘watchd0g.sh’ which took many victims and this incident was reported in 5 countries.
A Twitterati has responded to this saying:
“it is impossible to trade safely anymore as many developers now have the liberty to change the name of their app and icon to that of another game’s.”
Another Twitterati has posted:
“Glad that most of these games are being brought to light and getting removed. Hopefully steam implements something so they can prevent this in the future as letting these kinds of “games” through is kind of a big deal.”
The post Monero [XMR] mining leaves a trail: ‘Abstractism’ threatened appeared first on AMBCrypto.
Source: AMBcrypto
Original Post: Monero [XMR] mining leaves a trail: ‘Abstractism’ threatened
