Ever since Fortnite was introduced, it has arguably become the most sort after multi-player battle royale game, so much that player’s such as Tyler Blevins aka Ninja have gone on to make a living out of it.

A recent data published by research firm SensorTower showed that Fortnite has made nearly $300 million since its launch for the iOS platform, $20 million of that came in just one week of this month, thus displaying the immense popularity and fan following that the game has acquired.

On the basis of this mammoth success, earlier in the month, Fortnite went on to launch its newest season called Season 6. Although, the game remains very fragile and falls in the sights of anyone with malicious intent.

Malwarebytes has recently published data stating that there is a Bitcoin-stealing malware, along with several other data-stealing malware, that can easily target unsuspecting gamers. The online security firm claims that the malware is being distributed via Youtube video links, that offer some add-ons on the games.

Fortnite breaks another milestone to reach 200 million users

In an official statement, Malwarebytes went on to say, “First, we sifted through a sizable mish-mash of free season six passes, supposedly “free” Android versions of Fortnite, which were leaked out from under the developer’s noses, the ever-popular blast of “free V-Bucks” used to purchase additional content in the game, and a lot of bogus cheats, wallhacks, and aimbots.”

In a study, Researchers at Malwarebytes found that the malware is masked as a harmless file, that allows free game bonuses, that includes cheats like aim-bots and “V-Bucks”. The file has been identified as Trojan Malpack by the Malwarebytes research team. Once it gets downloaded, the malware unsuspiciously in the background, collecting and transferring data from the users’ web browser session information, Bitcoin wallets, Steam gaming sessions, as well as cookies and login tokens.

As per reports, the videos distributing this malicious file has been viewed nearly 120000 times before it was flagged enough to be taken down.

Fortnite is available for Apple macOS, Sony PlayStation 4, Android, iOS, Microsoft Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft Windows.

Notably, this is not the first instance where this globally trending multi-player battle royale game has been facing problems.

Ever since the much-awaited circumventing of the Google Play Store when the Fortnite game was launched on Android back in August, Google went on to demonstrate how the very first installation file shared by Epic Games for the Fortnite game installation on Android phones (these files come with .apk extension), would enable hackers to essentially transfer any malicious app to the devices. The Android device user would not have a single clue about any malicious background apps or activities running under right under the belt of Fortnite installer.

Thus, began the war of words. On 15th August, an intimation of this security update was given by Google to Epic Games, after which the issue was accredited by the game developer and it began fixing it, on 16 August.

However, the worst was yet to come for Android users as Epic Games then went on to ask Google something no Android user would probably want to hear— “We would like to request the full 90 days before disclosing this issue so our users have time to patch their devices.”

Google responded to this on 24 August, stating, “Now the patched version of Fortnite Installer has been available for 7 days we will proceed to un-restrict this issue in line with Google’s standard disclosure practices.”