For anybody wondering what is going on with $CANCER live stream… my life was saved for whole 24 hours untill someone tuned in my stream and got me to download verified game on
Steam
After this I was drained for over 32,000$ USD of my creator fees earned on pumpdotfun and everything quickly changed.
I can’t breathe, I can’t think, im completely lost on what is going to happen next, can’t shake the feeling that it is my fault that I might end up on street again or not have anything to eat in few days… my heart wants to jump out of my mouth and it hurts.
I won’t rewatch this myself but I have added a clip from the stream after I noticed what has happened.
also I have succesfully (CTOed) my creator rewards and they have been redirected to safe device.
Yesterday a video game streamer named rastalandTV inadvertently livestreamed themselves being a victim of a cryptodraining campaign.
This particular spearphishing campaign is extraordinarily heinous because RastaLand is suffering from Stage-4 Sarcoma and is actively seeking donations for their cancer treatment. They lost $30,000 of the money which was designated for their cancer treatment. In the steam clip their friend tries to console them while they cry out, “I am broken now.”
They were contacted by an unknown person who requested they play their video game demo (downloadable from Steam). In exchange for RastaLand playing their video game demo on stream, they would financially compensate them.
Unfortunately, the Steam game was actually a cryptodrainer masquerading as a legitimate video game.
It really isn’t. Scanning code for vulnerabilities should be at a very high standard for the dominant and most wealthy game platform on Earth.
Very standard practice for malicious software scanning is to install the program in a virtual environment and then monitor its processes to see if it’s performing malicious activities: eg keylogging while a background process (eg alt-tabbed), or if it interacts with browser data (trying to get saved auth cookies or saved account info), running searches for strings that are common for crypto wallets, etc.
Its entirely possible that Steam has dropped the ball in a big way here.
I can only imagine the animosity in the comments if it was from a game on the Epic store or Ubisoft UPlay…
And it is very easy to detect you’re in a virtual environment and not do those things, or have a date to trigger the changes or something. The game had been out for a while when this happened without any issues. I just dug a little bit and it was opening a back door apparently, so as long as the attacker did nothing at that time it would have been impossible to detect. You had to know that it was malicious to look for it, then it was quite obvious, but with Valve needing to vet millions of games it’s not feasible to do a full scan of every update of every game.
No automated scan would have captured this, only a paid professional dedicating some time would (and only because this was an obvious attempt, a more subtle one would go unnoticed even by an expert) and that is not feasible.
It literally contained a known version StealC malware in its payload, and had basic python scripting with the Telegram bot code and access tokens left visible to researchers (very bad OSINT). This was not sophisticated scripting, nor novel malware, just some script kid that sourced the whole setup on Telegram. The malware would easily have been captured by a competent security company’s automated scanner.
There are so many ways to bypass what you describe, in addition to it not working for games with kernel anti-cheat etc.
The real issue is all desktop OSes deciding everything should be allowed to access everything. Why is a game able to access your crypto wallet by default, without any permission required? Why can a fake pdf access browser cookies? This has been solved on phones for years.
And there are so many ways to detect the bypasses. It’s an arms race, and the most profitable games store of all time should really have a cutting edge system to deal with it is all I said.
Windows should have better security too, but the two thoughts can be held in the mind at the same time.
Well, I just disagree with you. IMO, they are a game distribution company, not a security company. I don’t see this as their job and I am not willing to pay more for games to have some far from perfect behavior scanning.
PS: That is not to say Steam should do nothing, just not behavior analysis, which is an unnecessarily difficult and expensive measure to implement and operate.
Who said you need to pay more for games? Steam already takes thirty percent of sales (for the vast majority of sales), they are a $10b+ game distribution company… They’re worth more than several leading security/antivirus companies combined.
I just don’t understand the mindset people get around Steam. They are a business that makes a fortune distributing games, run by a billionaire - they are not a little indie company struggling under the weight of their success.
And I don’t get the mindset of large company should do things for free. Valve is using the 30% to distribute games, provide backups for saves, run steam workshop, make games playable on Linux, creating the steam framework for games, and more. And of course keeps some of it as profit. Being a large company does not give you infinite resources. If they invest massive effort into some behavior analysis stuff, either they increase prices or cut something else they are doing.
All they’re expected to do is pay for upstream providers to scan their submissions (eg third party security providers), no need to hire new staff. This is the fourth instance publicized this year! They should communicate regarding issues like OPs - but like usual, it’s crickets.
If this is really just 4th instance this year, then it would be significantly cheaper to just reimburse the ~120k then to do what you are suggesting. Besides, a third party provider will hardly deliver a cutting edge scan for games.
Most importantly, whether they pay their own employees or a third party provider, the result is the same. Either prices go up or cost cutting happens elsewhere.
Steam does scan for malware, which is why this is news. It’s notable that a game got through that was malware. You haven’t heard about other stores because it’s not worth the effort in targeting them. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most stores use the same vendor for malware scanning.
It is to a very high standard. There’s been 14k games released this year alone which would be a .01% miss rate for malware games. If you compare against all games to account for updates that add malware after submission it’s basically 0 at .000001%
Its also trivial for apps detecting any trivial attempts at scanning if they’re running in a VM to be detected, and masked.
Those are also valid concerns, but in an environment where admin rights are granted to games installers the vendor of the games (Steam) needs to adopt a highly curated and protective stance. To this date they provide zero details of their protection - their entire FAQ on malware on their store boils down to ‘if you find malware, please flag it on the store page for us to investigate’.
If anyone is gonna claim the steam store is highly curated… I’d point out to them that a very large amount of their store is shovelware asset flips with very few purchases and installs. There are over 150,000 games on Steam, and tens of thousands of them would fall into that category.
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It really isn’t. Scanning code for vulnerabilities should be at a very high standard for the dominant and most wealthy game platform on Earth.
Very standard practice for malicious software scanning is to install the program in a virtual environment and then monitor its processes to see if it’s performing malicious activities: eg keylogging while a background process (eg alt-tabbed), or if it interacts with browser data (trying to get saved auth cookies or saved account info), running searches for strings that are common for crypto wallets, etc.
Its entirely possible that Steam has dropped the ball in a big way here.
I can only imagine the animosity in the comments if it was from a game on the Epic store or Ubisoft UPlay…
And it is very easy to detect you’re in a virtual environment and not do those things, or have a date to trigger the changes or something. The game had been out for a while when this happened without any issues. I just dug a little bit and it was opening a back door apparently, so as long as the attacker did nothing at that time it would have been impossible to detect. You had to know that it was malicious to look for it, then it was quite obvious, but with Valve needing to vet millions of games it’s not feasible to do a full scan of every update of every game.
Its “not feasible to do a full scan of every update of every game”?
My friend the scans are automated. Is Steam strapped for cash this month?
Honestly the apologia here for Steam is pretty rank.
No automated scan would have captured this, only a paid professional dedicating some time would (and only because this was an obvious attempt, a more subtle one would go unnoticed even by an expert) and that is not feasible.
It literally contained a known version StealC malware in its payload, and had basic python scripting with the Telegram bot code and access tokens left visible to researchers (very bad OSINT). This was not sophisticated scripting, nor novel malware, just some script kid that sourced the whole setup on Telegram. The malware would easily have been captured by a competent security company’s automated scanner.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/verified-steam-game-steals-streamers-cancer-treatment-donations/
There are so many ways to bypass what you describe, in addition to it not working for games with kernel anti-cheat etc.
The real issue is all desktop OSes deciding everything should be allowed to access everything. Why is a game able to access your crypto wallet by default, without any permission required? Why can a fake pdf access browser cookies? This has been solved on phones for years.
And there are so many ways to detect the bypasses. It’s an arms race, and the most profitable games store of all time should really have a cutting edge system to deal with it is all I said.
Windows should have better security too, but the two thoughts can be held in the mind at the same time.
Well, I just disagree with you. IMO, they are a game distribution company, not a security company. I don’t see this as their job and I am not willing to pay more for games to have some far from perfect behavior scanning.
PS: That is not to say Steam should do nothing, just not behavior analysis, which is an unnecessarily difficult and expensive measure to implement and operate.
Who said you need to pay more for games? Steam already takes thirty percent of sales (for the vast majority of sales), they are a $10b+ game distribution company… They’re worth more than several leading security/antivirus companies combined.
I just don’t understand the mindset people get around Steam. They are a business that makes a fortune distributing games, run by a billionaire - they are not a little indie company struggling under the weight of their success.
And I don’t get the mindset of large company should do things for free. Valve is using the 30% to distribute games, provide backups for saves, run steam workshop, make games playable on Linux, creating the steam framework for games, and more. And of course keeps some of it as profit. Being a large company does not give you infinite resources. If they invest massive effort into some behavior analysis stuff, either they increase prices or cut something else they are doing.
All they’re expected to do is pay for upstream providers to scan their submissions (eg third party security providers), no need to hire new staff. This is the fourth instance publicized this year! They should communicate regarding issues like OPs - but like usual, it’s crickets.
If this is really just 4th instance this year, then it would be significantly cheaper to just reimburse the ~120k then to do what you are suggesting. Besides, a third party provider will hardly deliver a cutting edge scan for games.
Most importantly, whether they pay their own employees or a third party provider, the result is the same. Either prices go up or cost cutting happens elsewhere.
removed by mod
Steam does scan for malware, which is why this is news. It’s notable that a game got through that was malware. You haven’t heard about other stores because it’s not worth the effort in targeting them. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most stores use the same vendor for malware scanning.
I didn’t say they dont scan for malware, I said it “should be to a very high standard”, fully understanding they already do.
It is to a very high standard. There’s been 14k games released this year alone which would be a .01% miss rate for malware games. If you compare against all games to account for updates that add malware after submission it’s basically 0 at .000001%
They’ve already missed four instances of malware this year that have been publicly reported. How many have other storefronts missed?
I don’t see why asking them out to improve is an unbalanced response or unfair, given the enormous budget they have and the market dominance.
It’s trivial to detect running in a vm and behave differently
It’s more like “why the industry standard to allow games installers to run as admin is widely accepted?”
Or “why a crypto wallet needs to have unencrypted files in the user home, ready for exfiltration?”
Its also trivial for apps detecting any trivial attempts at scanning if they’re running in a VM to be detected, and masked.
Those are also valid concerns, but in an environment where admin rights are granted to games installers the vendor of the games (Steam) needs to adopt a highly curated and protective stance. To this date they provide zero details of their protection - their entire FAQ on malware on their store boils down to ‘if you find malware, please flag it on the store page for us to investigate’.
If anyone is gonna claim the steam store is highly curated… I’d point out to them that a very large amount of their store is shovelware asset flips with very few purchases and installs. There are over 150,000 games on Steam, and tens of thousands of them would fall into that category.