50,000 Minecraft users infected with hard drive formatting malware

[recnic]

Is there a sample that someone can send me?
Gonna run a few tests.

[Canary]

One of the first PSP exploits used an image file to work, I believe an exploit for the 3Ds does too.

[Chubbs]

The PSP exploit ChickHEN was a problem with TIFF metadata parsing if I recall correctly.

The only 3DS exploit that was straight up file related is Soundhax, which was again a metadata parsing flaw in M4A sound files.

[Heartfire]

I can see this becoming a big issue, at least for people who download things without a care in the world.

[Panda X]

Powershell doesn't execute script files by double clicking them, it'll just open in Notepad. You have to explicitly open powershell (or cmd) and run it there. Even the the default execution policy probably won't let you run it.

[Acecool]

And I was thinking of jumping on Minecraft recently to see what has changed... Glad I decided against it...

And yes - you can embed information into many formats without sending up many red flags - file-size for an image can vary greatly based on format and quality so its difficult to use that as a method...

As for the overlay method to hide text - it severely degrades the quality of the image depending on the type you use... and the image you hide... it reveals itself when you use the select all feature or highlight the image... I played around with that a while back and put a tutorial on my site - but I had to lower the opacity of the intruding image quite a bit to make it not distort the original as much.

If you are putting text into an image - a green grass image isn't bad to use because you've got all of the different shapes, the shadows, etc... and green is easier to see and appears vividly...

Now, it could be an issue with Minecraft itself for executing the data - but more likely than not it is actually the image handler itself... Those are typically licensed to hell and protected like they're a god or something... I can see why with the security flaws that have been showing up over the last decades involving images.... but if they were open source they would've long been fixed by now...

[Anderan]

A lot of those are probably people who grew up with MC as kids. So the demographic was mostly kids at one point and they grew up with it and stuck to it.