Cheating in games can give you more then you asked for

Over the christmas break I’ve been spending some time playing a free MMORPG called Silkroad Online. Yesterday there was a bot on the server advertising about a cheat/trainer for the game called Legend Of Silkroad (or L.O.S. for short). I took interest of the advertisement because I wanted to know how those MMORPG cheat programs work (although the leveling of a character can be pretty boring at times, it is usually entertaining enough and does not interest me to cheat. It’s the journey, not the destination, that is the goal of the game). I downloaded the advertised zip file and decided to pass it through a virus scan before doing anything else with it, and as almost expected the cheat program had some unadvertised features, namely a backdoor program. Due to the fact the anti-malware community has not yet got the common naming scheme in place yet, the backdoor has almost as many names as there are scanners.

Now, I don’t know how many people who got their computers compromised by this tool, but my guess would be “quite a few”. Among the people I talk to on the server it seems that there are quite a few who have put their character on “autopilot” mode to level up.

Hopefully I will get a few minutes over for myself this weekend to unleash this malicious software in an virtual environment for a scientific study.

Below I have included the scan result from Virus Total.

For obvious reasons I have not included any links or mirrors to the infected file.