Background
Steam has more than 140 million users that is one of the biggest online gaming retailers in the world. Steam is developed by Valve Corporation for online multiplayer gaming, as well as other game-related situations.
Earlier this year, Valve made an announcement that Steam is going to open the online marketplace to nearly all games as long as they are not illegal. Valve’s decision provided more choices for gamers when they are browsing, however one game called “Abstracism” appeared to give users malfare.
According to the report, “Abstractism” got removed from Steam game platform since its startup program contains mining function.
Risk
“Abstractism” is a casual game, developed by a team called “okalo.union”. The game price on the Steam platform is only $0.99 USD ( the actual price is $0.49 USD due to 51% off discount).
The game’s item drop mechanism is obviously to encourage players to extend the game time, which is unlike other games that commonly used to complete tasks or collect items.
According to the user, “smokey”, posted the screenshots in Steam community that “100% certain it’s mining bitcoin on my computer”.
After that, okalo.union made an announcement which is very ridiculous: “Bitcoin is outdated, we currently use Abstractism to mine only Monero coins”. The second paragraph of the announcement is to deny the game was mining.
However, after a while, Okalo.union deleted the first paragraph.
Okalo.union’s latest announcement stated that they did not mine bitcoin, as well as Monero.
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However, it cannot convince Abstractism gamers. They all leave comments that they have become victims of the mining Trojan.
According to VirusTotal, there has been 19 antivirus software that can detect Abstractism mining Trojan, including 360 Total Security.
Reminder
Recently, we have found that a lot of CryptoMiner Trojans are actively spreading in the wild. We strongly recommend users to enable antivirus software while installing new applications. Users are also recommended to run virus scan with 360 Total Security to avoid falling victim to CryptoMiner.