Hackers abuse popular Godot game engine to infect thousands of PCs
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/27055106
Hackers have used new GodLoader malware exploiting the capabilities of the widely used Godot game engine to evade detection and infect over 17,000 systems in just three months.
15 replies
From Rémi Verschelde:
I think its malicious to even mention Godot in a headline with this weak context. It will confuse and scare people into thinking godot is unsafe. Some stupid people downloading and executing code from a malicious source is not noteworthy enough to justify a headline like this. It almost sounds like godot has a RCE from how clickbaity this headline is written.
This is probably the larger story from the OP link:
Edit: a bit more info:
https://research.checkpoint.com/2024/gaming-engines-an-undetected-playground-for-malware-loaders/
My take is that Godot has never claimed to be sandboxed, as long as OS.execute() is enabled by default then running arbitrary code in the user context is trivial. The solution of course is to only run code that you trust.
Yeah that is more headline worthy indeed.
Yeah not much to see here. GoDot just makes it easier to bypass the antivirus because of the code it outputs. It'll take a while and future malware that uses it will be detected the same way other malware is. I'm guessing antivirus companies will start unpacking and scanning the .pck files. Just like they do with similar archives.
One should not put their full trust in their antivirus anyways.
@recursive_recursion Godot was not abused. What I understand:
What actually happened: Bad actors realized that they could use Godot to code Malware that is not detected by antivirus software. They create open source tools on Github (Cracks, Twitch manager for example, and 188 others), but that tool is a Malware coded in Godot that downloads and runs additional malicious software.
What could happen, but probably didn't: Bad actors could change the data of a Godot game, turning it into malware.
Storm in a teacup.
But this is bad news for game jams. Participants are not really trustworthy and those who do not build for HTML5 should not be evaluated.
A web version is often a requirement (in my limitted jam experience).
This has always been true. If you are downloading an exe off the internet, it can be malicious. I am amazed by the streamers and Youtubers that seem willing to run anything. When I gamejam, I only write games that work in the browser and I only test/rate games that do the same. Unless you have a quarantine machine purpose built for running unknown code, it is really the only option.
I mean... Every game you download and run can do almost anything on your computer, no matter what it's written in. It's just code.
My first C2 agent I made for our malware to use in Red Teamings was a Unity Engine headless server.
Last time I checked you can spawn processes from any game engine, making this a moot point.
Thats true for anything that runs as a native app, but html builds will be sandboxed by the browser.
True, but the comment I was responding about not trusting non-web builds. This could imply that it's only for non-web build Godot games while you could easily do this with any engine.
Official article about the incident: https://godotengine.org/article/statement-on-godloader-malware-loader/