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Over the last few days, a series of mods for the PC strategy game Cities: Skylines have been removed from Steam after users began fearing that they contained all kinds of nasty stuff, from keyloggers to viruses to bitcoin mining software.
The alarm was sounded by this NME story and subsequent Reddit post, pointing out that the uploader of the mods had been banned, and that there was a serious risk to user’s computers. As the NME story explains:
In 2021, a modder going by the name of Chaos launched a “redesigned” version of a mod called Harmony, a vital framework project that most mods in Cities: Skylines rely upon to function.
Chaos also then “redesigned” several popular mods for the game, and listed his modified version of Harmony as a core download – meaning that players would have to go and download it for any dependent mods to work.
However, it’s been discovered that an automatic updater was buried in this version of Harmony, which would allow Chaos to deliver malware to the devices of anyone that downloaded it. Other malicious code was used to cripple the performance of other mods, which in turn caused players to download more of Chaos’ mods as they were advertised as solutions to these issues. This was discovered when some of the affected modders who, after receiving reports of slow performance from fans, found the malicious code.
While a scary prospect for any users who had downloaded the individual mods, an investigation by Cities: Skylines developers Colossal Order found that while the mods themselves didn’t contain anything as serious as first feared, they were still being deleted from Steam.
Read the full article on Kotaku
