Thousands of players have reportedly been plagued by a malicious Fortnite adware program. The problem has since been solved, but not by Epic Games. Streaming platform developer Rainway discovered the adware and proceeded to take it down. It later scolded Epic Games, saying that the Fortnite developer should do a “better job.”
As reported by Gamasutra, Rainway CEO Andrew Sampson shared the details of how his team discovered and removed the adware themselves. The entire ordeal basically began when Rainway started receiving hundreds of thousands of error reports to its tracker. Since Rainway didn’t feature ads of any kind, it became clear to the company that the threat came from outside.
Rainway then realized that all the users who reported errors had one thing in common, which is that they all played Fortnite. This in itself wasn’t surprising, due to the massive popularity of the game, but the team kept digging. The team had to download hundreds of malicious programs, with the purpose of pinpointing which one is the culprit for this specific error. It turns out that the adware in question was a hack “claiming to allow players to generate free V-bucks and use an aimbot” for cheating.
Near the end of the post, Sampson revealed his team received a total of 381,000 before the adware was finally removed. He ends the post by saying: “Epic could do a better job at educating their users on these malicious programs and helping them understand how airtight Fortnite‘s systems are at preventing cheating. I’d also recommend they spend more time moderating YouTube to help take down these videos to avert a countless number of people from pwning themselves. Sometimes the allure of cheating is powerful, and a strong presence is needed to help push people in the right direction.”
Fortnite has gotten so big that it managed to gain two million downloads on the Nintendo Switch merely 24 hours after it launched on the hybrid console. With a Fortnite World Cup coming in 2019, you can bet that the battle royale game is only going to get bigger. Thus, it will be the responsibility of Epic Games to ensure that Fortnite remains safe for everyone to play, although it won’t get any easier with the increasing player base and choice of platforms.
