An FPS studio pulled its game from Steam after it got caught linking to malware disguised as a demo

[Kaz]

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First reported by TheGamer, a Steam listing for a game called Sniper: Phantom's Resolution has been pulled from the storefront by the developer after players discovered malware being distributed as a "demo" from the dev's official website. Though the site had a link on Steam, the malware was not distributed through Steam itself like last month's PirateFi fiasco.

The case against developer Sierra Six seems almost airtight, but someone purporting to be one of the developers has surfaced on Reddit to claim that they were set up, and that their domain was hijacked before they had the chance to secure it.

 

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An FPS studio pulled its game from Steam after it got caught linking to malware disguised as a demo, but the dev insists it was actually the victim of a labyrinthine conspiracy | PC Gamer

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I thought this one was going to be simple when I first looked into it.

 

From the sounds of it they were the victim of a domain hijack, where the domain is not registered, or the registration lapses, and someone else takes it.  This is a lot more common attack than people realize.  David Bombal interviewed a hacker who he permitted to attempt to hack him.  They found a domain that he no longer had registered but still had some links pointing to.  He's a security researcher, so this stuff can happen to just about anyone.  From the game dev, not registering the domain in the first place while publicly pointing to it is a pretty big mistake.  Might be the kind of mistake that a dev with a half baked game makes...

Edited March 23 by bonami2
Title was too long missing detail.