Fortnite has a cheating problem and it isn’t doing enough to fix it

WIRED / iStock / Jane_Kelly

Fortnite has won the fight to become the biggest battle royale game but it has one huge problem: cheats. It’s a breeze to download software that claims to rig the game in your favour. Want to automatically aim better? Surefire vicgtory is only a couple of clicks away. Except, of course, it isn’t.

A cheat installed by users thousands of times, which was meant to give both in-game currency and an ‘aimbot’ to make shots more accurate, actually contained malware. The goal of the scammers? To make money. The code, discovered by game-streaming service Rainway, allowed a man-in-the-middle attack to direct web traffic through a web ads service, making the cheat’s creator money.

After noticing an unusual quantity of error reports from its tracker, Rainway found the common link was the users playing, or more specifically cheating, at Fortnite. Instead of getting ahead, those who used the cheat instead found themselves infected with adware, a fairly common fate for hack downloaders, and proof that cheaters never prosper.

It’s up to anti-cheat providers to protect games from those who seek to break them open. Bastian Suter, the CEO and lead developer of BattlEye, a service that aims to protect both Fortnite and its main rival, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, as well as many other online enabled titles, runs one of these providers. He explains that this kind of cheat is common, that is, the cheat that doesn’t actually function as a cheat, but is simply just disguised malware. “There simply isn’t much public stuff for [Battleye] games out there.” The ones which do work are usually shared only in private groups, making it hard for anti-cheat companies to get a hold of them.

The source of these downloads, Suter says, often lead back to one country in particular. “China is one of biggest challenges for us currently. The hacking market in China is huge. Hackers there update pretty much all the time and so it’s a constant battle against them. As a result, the issue cannot be completely solved, however this also pushes us to constantly improve.” In February 2016, malware was discovered in add-ons for the online card game Hearthstone.

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