Valve Corporation is an American video game company, in which Kaspersky Lab detected a new malware which can hack user’s accounts and credentials.
New Malware Hacked Thousands Of Players Accounts On Steam
The most favorite targets of cyber-criminals are Bank and personal data. However, now they are targeting the video game market for PC. Moreover, no wonder: the sector is estimated at more than US $ 100 billion. Therefore, Kaspersky Lab announced a warning about a new type of malware which is responsible for hijacking user’s credentials from the famous Valve game platform(Steam).
The goal of the scams is to steal items from online games and player accounts to resell them on the black market. To, do so, the criminals are part of a group called Steam Stealer (Steam credentials thief), which also names the malware. According to the security company, the malicious program was originally developed by the cyber criminals who speak Russian, and they have found several traces of the language in private malware forums.
The scammers behind Steam Stealer work with a malware business model as a service, offering different method, including purchase in several versions, different features, free updates, user manuals, personalized distribution recommendations and many more. The default starting price of “solutions” of this type of campaign is in the range of US $ 500, but the bad guys sell for up to US $ 30. Which makes it extremely attractive to malware seeking cyber criminals around the world. When the malware enters the user’s system, he steals the whole set of Steam configuration files. Then locates the file “KeyValue“, which contains the credentials, and maintenance information of the sessions, through this data, cyber criminals control the user’s account.
Santiago Pontiroli, global team analyst research and analysis of Kaspersky Lab said that “The community of online players has become a highly wanted target for cyber criminals. There was a clear evolution of the techniques of infection and spread used, as well as a growing complexity of the malware itself, which led to the increase in this type of activity. With the addition of more advanced components in the game consoles and the Internet of Things coming into our homes, possibly this scenario will continue developing and becoming more complex,”. The spread of Steam Stealer occurs in many ways, but mostly phishing sites, for the distribution of malware, or by social engineering.
Experts at Kaspersky Lab discovered almost 1,200 different samples of Steam Stealer, who were responsible for attacks on thousands of users around the world, mainly in Russia and other Eastern European countries. Besides them, other affected countries are the United States and India.
Kaspersky Lab also detected other groups of Trojan Steam Stealer, and here we have a list of few:-
“Trojan.Downloader.Msil.Steamilik, Trojan.Msil.Steamilik and Trojan-psw.Msil.Steam.”
According to the Valve, over 100 million people are registered on Steam, which has thousands of downloadable games. Of this total, 77,000 accounts are hacked and looted within a month.
