Flight Sim Expansion Developer Discovered to Inject Malware into Product as DRM
What seemed like a harmless expansion to "Flight Simulator" turned out to contain malicious malware designed to steal the user's password information.
Despite its age, "Microsoft Flight Simulator X" is still a very popular game that has managed to stay active and relevant — thanks to the community it has and the number of developers that create mods and extensions for it that add new planes and features. However, the community hit some controversy recently when a Reddit user discovered that one of these expansion developers, FSLabs, inserted a Chrome password extraction tool into one of its packages.
When this topic began to grow, FSLabs founder Lefteris Kalamaras confirmed that the malicious tool is supposed to be there, but claims that it serves as a form of digital rights management (DRM) against anyone that pirates their game. According to his message, the malware in question only targets a specific serial number of the file, one that has been making its rounds across the different pirate and torrent sites. He later updated his post with a new version of the installer that does not come with the supposed DRM check.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
While piracy is a growing concern in any entertainment and media industry, this really does not seem like the way to go about it. It immediately places distrust in the company in question and sinks their reputation to the ground.
"The inclusion of a malware, in the form of a password dumper, in a trusted installer for the sake of combating piracy is absolute insanity," Andrew Mabbitt, founder of cybersecurity company Fidus Information Security, told Motherboard.
This whole incident has painted a massive stain on FSLabs' reputation, especially when the company would often tell people in the past to disable their antivirus software because it would identify their installer as malware and claimed that it was a false positive.
And, while this might just be a coincidence, an incident three months ago occurred when someone that legally purchased the A320 add-on from FSLabs got their credit card details stolen. Again, might be pure coincidence, but with the recent news regarding FSLabs' use of malware to "protect" their game from pirates, very few people are able to give them the benefit of the doubt.
