Bad faith actors using Steam as a vehicle to peddle malware is nothing new. We constantly see Workshop mods and games designed as trojans to install harmful software on players’ computers, with Meccha Chameleon even falling victim recently after investigating claims of illicit maps, losing access to its official Discord server in the process. But now, these bad-faith actors are spilling out onto the Steam Forums, hijacking help threads to install cryptominers on users’ computers.
As reported by Bleeping Computer, it’s a simple setup: someone posts about a broken install, their game crashing, or some other technical problem — looking to the community for help — and then a scammer tells them to open PowerShell as an administrator and paste in a command. That command quietly installs an XMRig executable, secretly planting the cryptominer on their hardware.
It’s known as a ClickFix attack, requiring both administrator privileges and user input to work. So, it needs to be believable, and when presented as the solution to a technical problem on the Steam Forums, it’s easy for a scammer to dupe unsuspecting players into downloading the software. To that end, it displays fake errors, verification prompts, and troubleshooting instructions that appear genuine, while...
