October 16, 2019

Russian anti-virus company Doctor Web will be participating in the international cybersecurity conference Avar 2019, which will be held in Osaka, Japan, on November 6-9, 2019. The company's security researchers will report on the infamous botnet Trojan.Belonard, which has targeted the computers of Counter Strike players. It is also worth mentioning that Dr.Web successfully detects all Belonard modules.

Usually when it comes to threats related to video games, the first thing we talk about is stolen accounts. However, there exists another kind of danger, one many security researchers often overlook—an entire industry of underground services is at work promoting game servers. More often than not, illegal methods are involved, including infecting game clients. The Trojan.Belonard botnet was designed to promote servers running Counter Strike 1.6.

On November 8, at the Conference, Igor Zdobnov, Doctor Web’s chief malware researcher, and his colleague, Ivan Korolev, will talk at length about the Trojan.Belonard threat. Doctor Web has conducted thorough research on this threat. The company published published the results on its website in March 2019. By leveraging a Counter Strike client vulnerability, the botnet makers herded infected machines into their infrastructure in order to promote game servers for a fee. Thanks to the efforts of our security researchers, Dr.Web is now able to detect all the Trojan’s modules, rendering it incapable of posing a threat to users whose systems are protected by Dr.Web.

#video_games #conferences #botnet