Family-friendly game Rodent Race has had its Steam listing hijacked by crypto-stealing malware masquerading as an indie horror game. The game has now been delisted from Steam by Valve after a fan investigation.
After being asked to investigate indie horror game Beyond The Dark, YouTuber Eric Parker downloaded the free-to-play title on a Virtual Machine to see if warnings of it being malware were warranted. After an investigation – which can be viewed in full on his YouTube channel – he concludes that it is malicious. A full breakdown of the investigation can be seen on malware analysis site Any Run.
When installed and played, Beyond The Dark appears to steal credentials for any cryptocurrency wallets associated with the user’s machine or web browser. As a result, visiting Beyond The Dark’s Steam page now will reveal that it has been removed from Steam by Valve.
SteamDB shows the app’s changelist, where we can see that the game was previously titled Rodent Race, and had all of its information changed in early May. Previously listed publisher hyperg8 has little to no online footprint.
One of the few examples of Rodent Race gameplay – which we found via the Rodent Race X account – is posted on YouTube by the channel diamond hands. Searching for publisher hyperg8 also reveals an X account dedicated to crypto, but there’s no proof that either of those crypto-themed accounts is related to the original publisher. Likewise, there’s no proof that the Rodent Race developer was actually hacked.
Using the Wayback Machine, we can see that the original Rodent Race page featured an AI-generated content disclosure, stating: “Used KI to generate all game art and logos and manually modified it.” The same disclosure remains on Beyond The Dark.
Rodent Race only peaked at just one concurrent player at launch, according to SteamDB, but rebranding as the free-to-play Beyond The Dark saw that rise to five concurrent players.
Most suspiciously, the game received a string of positive reviews from May 7 to May 18, before negative reviews from concerned Steam users took the game’s rating down to Mixed, at which point Valve removed the game.
Valve moved quickly to remove the game, but it does raise concerns about safety on the usually reliable PC platform.
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