With the popularity and the fame that cryptocurrencies are experiencing immediately, it also comes those who wish to cash in on harming others and taking advantage of the decentralized characteristic of these new forms of money. This time it was the company that developed Abstractism, a game that was listed on Steam, one among the most popular online game store and community within the whole world. The game had to be removed from the store as a result of it had been using the computers of the players to mine cryptocurrency, a factor that's usually referred to as crypto jacking.
Abstractism is an indie platformer that features simple graphics and it's presented as a relaxing game very useful to burn time, but the community began to have its doubts about it as a result of the game used too many resources for a platformer in its style. Also, Okalo Union, the company that developed the game, inspired players to stay the game running even in the background as how of getting a lot of in-game time to earn more items, a thing that's extremely suspicious as a result of according to some players the game kept exploitation high processing percentages even in that state.
Steam has removed the game from its platform because of shipping “unauthorized code”, in keeping with Kotaku, but it's clear that the team accountable of approving games to be listed and offered in their store lost badly this time, permitting customers computers to be misused by this unethical developer.
Cryptojacking is turning into one of the most common crimes in the world of cryptocurrencies, because of the relative easy the attackers to embed the mining code in every app or game that can be then be distributed over the internet. While the cryptocurrency being mined this time wasn't disclosed, most of the times it's a privacy and anonymity based currency referred to as Monero, that allows the offender to defend itself from being detected. It's clear that app stores and markets are having a tough time detecting malicious apps, and will need to ramp up security in the near future to avoid incidents like this one.
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