'Fortnite' cheaters get a lesson in karma via malware

"Cheaters never win" and "if it's too good to be true, it probably is" are just a few maxims that come to mind with the news that PC Fortnite players who may have tried to employ a certain cheat may have exposed themselves to some vicious malware.

Andrew Sampson, CEO of game-streaming service Rainway, posted on the company's Medium blog (via Engadget) about the discovery of a flood of error reports on the company's servers. Those errors, it turns out, came from a downloadable hack for the ever-popular game that was actually disguised malware.

The hack, writes Sampson, allows Fortnite players to "generate free V-Bucks and use an aimbot." That's a combination that seems like a dream to many players.

Except, according to Sampson, it unleashes a nightmare on unsuspecting users: "it immediately installed a root certificate on the device and changed Windows to proxy all web traffic through itself. A successful Man in the Middle Attack," an attack that allows the third party to inject itself into the two-way connection between the player and the server.

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In this case, the attack injected malicious adware that leaves users vulnerable to all sorts of attacks and data theft. And if you think you're safe, think again: Sampson said the file was downloaded by Rainway users over 78,000 times leading to nearly 400,000 error reports.

This is just the latest example of malware drama for Fortnite as fraudulent versions of the game tricked Android users into downloading it even though the game isn't yet officially available on Android (though it will be later this summer).

We've reached out to Epic Games for comment on the hack.