50,000 Users Infected with Malware from Minecraft Skins

Even today, Minecraft remains to be a prominent game on the "regular players" leaderboards. The do-as-you-wish build and crafting game is a peaceful alternative to the currently popular battle royale game, Fortnite. Unfortunately, a number of Minecraft skins have been infecting users' computers with hard drive-destroying malware.

These skins were uploaded and distributed covertly through the official Minecraft website. Affecting around 50,000 players, the malware would be embedded into the image files for player skins and would launch a hard drive formatting script. The embedded PowerShell code would often time include trolly or harassing messages, such as You Are Nailed, Buy A New Computer This Is A Piece Of crap, or You have maxed your internet usage for a lifetime.

This isn't a top of the line hack. But given the innocent and unknowing nature of children combined with the massive reach of official Minecraft servers, this has infected far more people than it should have. If you recently downloaded a new Minecraft skin, you may want to run your anti-virus software. Mojang is working on resolving the issue. So until then, best stick to the skin you have.