Survive the storm: Fortnite malware downloaded 78,000 times

Rainway CEO provides post-mortem on adware-riddled cheating program.

Nearly 80,000 would-be cheaters who were looking to gain an advantage over their fellow Fortnite Battle Royale players have inadvertently infected their PCs with malware.

Since its launch in September last year, Fortnite has grown to become the world’s hottest video game, with an estimated 40 million players across PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and iOS.

Epic Games’ free-to-play title – a continuation of the hugely popular battle royale genre – sees 100 players drop in on an ever-shrinking map, collecting resources and weapons, and fighting it out to be the last person standing.

Cheat sheet

Fortnite’s popularity has been fueled by an active streaming community and celebrity-filled live events, but newcomers to the game are often disappointed at their lack of progress, as they are pitted against more experienced players.

In light of this issue (coupled with the fact that miscreants are constantly looking for ways to profit from the top stories of the day), sites such as YouTube have become awash with videos advertising ways to cheat and generate free ‘V-Bucks’ – the in-game virtual currency used to purchase cosmetic upgrades and other items.

It’s no surprise that these purported Fortnite hacks are all debunked as scams. Yet while most players are well aware of the risks associated with downloading programs housed on obscure sites, one in particular has been found to have been downloaded a whopping 78,000 times.

Make it rain

This latest piece of malware targeting Fortnite players was unveiled earlier this week by developers at Rainway, a streaming app that allows users to play PC games across different devices.

According to CEO Andrew Sampson, Rainway began receiving “hundreds of thousands” of error reports on June 26. After investigating the issue, the app’s engineers found one striking correlation: the errors were all coming from devices on which Fortnite had been played.

“Not being ones to believe in coincidence and armed with an idea, we sat out to find the possible source of this mischief,” Sampson explained.

In an effort to find the source of the malware, Rainway downloaded hundreds of Fortnite ‘cheating’ programs being advertised on YouTube, and scoured the source code for references to the URLs the company had detected through error logging.

“After hours of painstaking searching, we struck oil,” Sampson said in his