We have a virus removal customer who is getting repeat infections. Their son plays Grand Theft Auto (purchased at a store) and spends a lot of time doing it in multi-player mode. Being familiar with the perils of file sharing I was wondering if there are any known worms plaguing players of this or other multi-player games?
One of the Trojans detected by Kaspersky is: trojan-downloader.multi.mu
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GTA IV via the Steam interface is as close to bulletproof as you can get. I suspect your initial diagnosis is spot on.
They're are a victim of socially engineered infections. Possibly they know this and want to point at the game?
If by "fake alert" you mean something like vundo or Windows Anti-Virus 2009 type then they are certainly downloads outside of gaming.
As already covered hacks & cracks - probably unecessary given this is a legit GTA IV install are a risk as are some mods.
Get them off filesharing for a while and see if the rate of infection reduces.
Better still suggest you'll have to take the PC away to analyze every site it's been to and everything downloaded over the past few months ;)
xxdcmast probably hit the nail on the head there. You may want to see if he's downloading any mods to the game or cheats.
Video game sites that tout mods and hacks are full of viruses. Especially with the older versions of GTA. Theres only so much you can do to protect from viruses when the user is inadvertently searching for them.
My recomendation would be to keep track of them and see what viruses he's prone to getting and using a firewall to block for those specific ones. Other then that, continuous cleaning will probably be your answer.
I think you're all right. I know nothing about games so I wanted to know if there's any problems, but the rest of the behaviors are more likely to cause the problems. The son is a typically bright and naughty 12-13 year old.
I'm going to recommend that they use their McAfee parental controls to limit his travel, but I'm not sure this will avoid all chat rooms. Also, would parental controls mean that Grand Theft Auto would be blocked, or is this something we can make an exception for? I've been pushing OpenDNS for office and school situations, maybe I can get them to open an account..
You can do a ton of stuff to lock the computer down for a 12-13 year old gamer, while still allowing him to access things he "should" be accessing.
You can set quite a few limitations with built in software in Windows depending on the version. Preventing any installations of software is a start, blocking access to anything on the internet that a 12-13 year old kid shouldn't be looking at with an internet "nanny". Tons more stuff.
I've assumed it's GTA IV but is it an earlier version?
The problem with most torrenting/filesharing software is that if it is blocked it will try other ports.
I'm not a great one for Internet censoring & prefer the educatiional approach. How not to get your system infected would be the way I'd go & add some realtime scanning to pick stuff up before it really lands. For me Parental Controls are about parents talikng to their kids about responsible use of the PC. Then if necesary setting and enforcing rules. Netnanny and the like have a role to play but sometimes are an excuse to leave young people unattended thinking they are "safe".
Personal opinion and probably there are a number of people who'd disagree but there you have it :)
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by: xxdcmastPosted on 2009-08-11 at 12:21:34ID: 25072375
I dont think necessarily that there is a vulnerability in the multiplayer game itself. The producers of these games usually tend to lock them down pretty well. I would tend to think that it would be the actions that go along with the multiplayer games.
Is their son going into chatrooms/message forums about the multiplayer game?
Is he download mods/patches/hacks for the game from other users/sites that could possibly have virus in them?
Is it even related to the game and not normal internet browsing, its possible he is getting infected in other ways?
Is the son looking at stuff maybe he shouldnt be porn or other type of websites?
Remember even though there may be vulnerabilities in games/software the largest attack vector is usually the human side of things.