Security News > 2023 > February > Malicious Dota 2 game modes infected players with malware
Security researchers have discovered four malicious Dota 2 game modes that were used by a threat actor to backdoor the players' systems.
The unknown attacker created four game modes for the highly popular Dota 2 multiplayer online battle arena video game and published them on the Steam store to target the game's fans, as Avast Threat Labs researchers found.
"These game modes were named Overdog no annoying heroes, Custom Hero Brawl, and Overthrow RTZ Edition X10 XP," Avast malware researcher Jan Vojt?šek said.
While the threat actor made it very easy to detect the bundled backdoor in the first game mode published on the Steam Store, the twenty lines of code malicious code included with the three newer game modes were much harder to spot.
Avast reported their findings to Valve, the Dota 2 MOBA game developer, who updated the vulnerable V8 version on January 12, 2023.
Valve also took down the malicious game modes and alerted all players impacted by the attack.