Modding Minecraft & You

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Just when you thought your children were building a harmless digital landscape for themselves comes an upload of new problems. Hackers have been changing the attack vector landscape for themselves which could have your bank account seeing a lot of red.

It has been well known by now, even if you have been living underneath a 1970 Volvo station wagon, that the game “Minecraft” has been the focus for hackers over the past couple of years. The last major event was Log4j, a vulnerability exploit that set the internet ablaze for a few weeks.

A thing we would like to see is how much of a problem this will be and whether it will continue in the foreseeable future. Like normal, we’ll be looking at what the attack is, who used or created it, its functions and effects upon its release, and some ways you could keep safe.

The Attack

This is no secret by now that hackers have been using Minecraft as a place to commit their nefarious deeds. The latest of their information-stealing malware/spyware is being called “Fractureiser”.

If you’re unfamiliar with mods and modding we’ll quickly explain, there are some cases where a game is good, but it could be better, this is where independent developers or bored developers put together some code and add it to sections of the game. Like in Skyrim, there was a mod to have Tony Starks Iron Man armor.

It’s a grey area when it comes to knowing if modding is legal in the gaming industry because there are some games that can get banned from servers but to keep things simple, remember not to mod games where you must play with a community.

Who Can It Be Now

At the moment no one has been named, neither group or individual responsible for the creation or use of the malware but threat actors have been using platforms like CurseForge and Bukkit as attack vectors for the malware.

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Sinking Feeling

Fractureiser’s functionality has been reported by Bleeping Computer, breaking it down into four stages of the attack. In the beginning, stage, when a mod is uploaded, it’s hijacked and injected with malicious code into the main class of the given project.

This attack is taking place in the Java programming language, just know Java is popular and used everywhere. The main class is a section of the code that holds what the program is going to execute. The program is overwritten and connected to a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that downloads a file unique to the operating system (OS).

Afterward, another connection is made where the malware captures the user’s IP address and reports it back to the command and control (C2C) server. The malware then connects the same IP address to port 8083 for it to download another file and save it to the machine’s OS. The possible effects of having your information collected could be endless as it could be used by the threat actor to purchase loans and other things in your name or can be sold to other interested parties.

This all takes place while you are building your world in Minecraft. Just when you thought you were being the crafty one.

The Prevention

Outside of you crafting your way to new beginnings, it seems like this will continue to be a problem in the future because hackers are coming up with new ways to onboard malware to your machine.

An inconvenience for having this on your machine is the reinstallation of the OS which could wipe out everything if not frequently saved via an external drive. The best way to keep your machine and your wallet safe is to keep from adding modifications to the game since there could be malicious files or code injected into the uploaded package.  

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Do you feel like there is something I may have missed on Fractureiser? Script a comment below.