Team Fortress 2's Bot Hackers Are Now Extorting Players For Immunity
The arrogance of bot hackers in Team Fortress 2 has reached a whole new level, as they are now extorting players for immunity via in-game messages. Recently, the popular title has been bringing a lot of trouble to the community and even infecting gamers’ computers with malware.
After one of Valve’s developers purposefully leaked licensed source code for CS:GO and Team Fortress 2, hackers took advantage of it and developed malicious software that was able to infect TF2 players’ computers. The first reports regarding this issue started to surface a year ago, last April. According to numerous sources, playing Team Fortress 2 was dangerous due to the risk of malware from Remote Code Execution.
Bots have recently become one of the worst issues in Team Fortress 2 as they are being used to cheat, spam unwanted advertisements, and even promote child sexual abuse content. According to a thorough report by Eurogamer, the bot infestation has been ramping up over the past couple of months. Recently bots have begun to share links to online shops where players can purchase more bots or buy into so-called “bot immunity.” Basically, this allows buyers to put themselves on a white list, which contains Steam accounts that are then ignored by that particular type of bot. Eurogamer calls it a modern version of digital racketeering. On top of that, some bot hosters offer a “buy-out” option. Once it’s purchased, the owner of cheating AI promises to stop hosting it forever. Recently reported behavior from some bots, however, is much worse than racketeering, as these systems are being used to promote and sell images that allegedly contain depictions of child sexual abuse (or child porn). For the time being, Valve hasn’t come up with a working solution to the issue.
Another Valve game, CS:GO, is currently suffering from a different issue, which became possible due to a vulnerability in the game’s code. According to a recent report, hackers are able to run fraudulent software through the invite system. After accepting such an invite, an unsuspecting player becomes defenseless, losing account information. Basically, hackers can easily steal passwords from Steam users by simply sending deceptively innocent invites to a game of CS:GO.
The recent situation with bots infesting casual matches in Team Fortress 2 has clearly gone out of control. Although Valve did take specific measures to stop the spread of the issue in the past, it’s quite obvious that immediate reaction from the company is required to put an end to the usage of bots once and for all. It’ll probably require complex technical solutions, but ignoring the problem is much worse, considering how popular the game remains to this date - and how unprotected its audience is.
Source: Eurogamer