Crackonosh virus hides in Pirated Games


Are you a Game Lover? , you have to be careful of the "pirate" Copies of your favorite Video and android games.  Avast The most common cybersecurity company published an investigation carried out by its Threat Laboratory on the discovery of a new malware called Crackonosh that hides in "cracked copies" games.

Crackonosh is a kind of mining program that takes its name from Czech folklore meaning "mountain spirit" and has been published since at least June 2018.

According to Avast investigation, this malware has already generated its authors more than two million dollars in the Monero cryptocurrency, coming from more than 222000 infected systems around the world. Avast even warns that Crackonosh has already infected 2,200 systems in Mexico.

The majority of users infected with Crackonosh are from Brazil, the United States, India, the Philippines and Poland, with an average of between 12 and 19 thousand infected systems per country.

Crackonosh spreads by getting into "cracked" copies of popular online games. Cracked copies are pirated  games that people can download for free, to avoid paying for the original versions.

Crackonosh malware has been found in cracked versions of these games:

  • Fallout 4 GOTY
  • Call of Cthulhu
  • NBA 2K19
  • Grand theft auto v
  • Far cry 5
  • Pro Evolution Soccer 2018
  • We Happy Few
  • The Sims 4 Seasons
  • Euro Truck Simulator 2
  • The sims 4
  • Jurassic World Evolution

How Crackonosh Works?

When Crackonosh is installed, it looks for a way to protect itself, so it replaces critical files on the Windows system and force-stop some security programs such as Adaware, Bitdefender, Escan, F-secure, Kaspersky, Mcafee (scanner), Norton and Panda.

"Crackonosh is very profitable for attackers and warns of the risks of downloading cracked software. As long as people continue to download cracked software, these types of attacks will continue to be profitable for their authors," says Daniel Beneš, malware researcher at Avast.

If you like you can watch this video tutorial for How to remove Crackonosh from your system:

Good Luck

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