Almost half of cheats for online games threaten user safety

[Tomcat]

As part of the joint fight against cheating in the gaming industry, Kaspersky Lab and MY.GAMES have presented the results of the study "Security risks when using cheats in online games." Using the Warface game as an example, the experts analyzed the prevalence of threats among the cheating software available on the Internet.

According to experts, 42% of publicly available potential cheats (including files that are positioned as cheats) contain a security threat to users' computers. 41% of threats are potentially dangerous adware that can download malware, 9% are stealing Trojans to steal passwords and other data, 5% are unwanted software (not necessarily malicious, but can slow down your PC), 4% are backdoors for hidden remote control of the infected computer. The rest of the threats (41%) are Trojans of different families.

Experts classified 4 types of potential cheats for the Warface game according to the complexity of the mechanism of their operation and made a selection of cheats for each of the categories. In total, 53 unique types of cheats were recorded during the year. Among them are the simplest cheats (13% of the total sample), working inside the game client process, medium-difficulty cheats (17%), working inside another process and accessing the game client using special drivers or vulnerabilities in anti-cheat, high complexity cheats (4%) working inside another process and accessing the game client using self-developed and installed rootkits in the OS kernel. The category of “fakes” was classified separately (66%), in which files were presented that were only positioned as cheats.

According to experts, among "fakes" and simple cheats, almost every second file posed a threat to users. However, the more complex the cheat, the more chances that the threat will turn out to be more dangerous when instead of adware in cheats there is software to steal passwords and other data from the user's computer.