Hackers target gamers looking for cheats for popular video games, trick them with an ad to get certain improvements, and instead introduce “malware” to their computers, as Activision has warned.
The developer and distributor has shared a report, ‘Cheating cheaters: malware delivery as Call of Duty Cheats’, about a new tactic: passing it on as a trap for Call of Duty: Warzone which is basically a ‘dropper’, a type of Trojan that makes it easier for other more harmful ‘malware’ to gain access to your computer.
Specifically, the report examines the Cod Dropper v0.1 ‘dropper’, and goes back to March 2020, when a series of announcements about a new method for distributing known remote access trojans were identified in various ‘hacker’ forums. As RAT, for the acronym in English.
Unlike other more sophisticated distribution methods, this ad was aimed directly at gamers prone to cheating as this type of ‘software’ requires removing some protection barriers such as antivirus or ‘firewall’ and requests to run with the highest levels of privileges on the system.
The ‘dropper’ in the report is aimed specifically at Call of Duty: Warzone players – a free multiplayer – and is camouflaged in the forums as an easy-to-install trap that the game’s anti-cheat systems fail to detect.