Hackers abuse popular Godot game engine to infect thousands of PCs
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/27055106
Hackers have used new GodLoader malware exploiting the capabilities of the widely used Godot game engine to evade detection and infect over 17,000 systems in just three months.
From Rémi Verschelde:
As the Check Point Research report states, the vulnerability is not specific to Godot. The Godot Engine is a programming system with a scripting language. It is akin to, for instance, the Python and Ruby runtimes. It is possible to write malicious programs in any programming language. We do not believe that Godot is particularly more or less suited to do so than other such programs.
Users who merely have a Godot game or editor installed on their system are not specifically at risk. We encourage people to only execute software from trusted sources.
For some more technical details:
Godot does not register a file handler for ".pck" files. This means that a malicious actor always has to ship the Godot runtime together with a .pck file. The user will always have to unpack the runtime together with the .pck to the same location and then execute the runtime. There is no way for a malicious actor to create a "one click exploit", barring other OS-level vulnerabilities. If such an OS-level vulnerability were used then Godot would not be a particularly attractive option due to the size of the runtime.
This is similar to writing malicious software in Python or Ruby, the malicious actor will have to ship a python.exe or ruby.exe together with their malicious program.
I think its malicious to even mention Godot in a headline with this weak context. It will confuse and scare people into thinking godot is unsafe. Some stupid people downloading and executing code from a malicious source is not noteworthy enough to justify a headline like this. It almost sounds like godot has a RCE from how clickbaity this headline is written.
This is probably the larger story from the OP link:
The Stargazers Ghost Network uses over 3,000 GitHub "ghost" accounts to create networks of hundreds of repositories that can be used to deliver malware (mainly information stealers like RedLine, Lumma Stealer, Rhadamanthys, RisePro, and Atlantida Stealer) and star, fork, and subscribe to these malicious repos to push them to GitHub's trending section and increase their apparent legitimacy.
Edit: a bit more info:
The malicious GodLoader is distributed by the Stargazers Ghost Network, a GitHub network that distributes malware as a service. Throughout September and October, approximately 200 repositories and over 225 Stargazers were used to legitimize the repositories distributing the malware.
https://research.checkpoint.com/2024/gaming-engines-an-undetected-playground-for-malware-loaders/
My take is that Godot has never claimed to be sandboxed, as long as OS.execute() is enabled by default then running arbitrary code in the user context is trivial. The solution of course is to only run code that you trust.
This is a non issue. It's like saying hackers used a programming language to write malicious code.
Of course they did. How else would they do it?
They're just using the Godot engine (C#) to do it instead of the python interpreter.
Yeah not much to see here. GoDot just makes it easier to bypass the antivirus because of the code it outputs. It'll take a while and future malware that uses it will be detected the same way other malware is. I'm guessing antivirus companies will start unpacking and scanning the .pck files. Just like they do with similar archives.
One should not put their full trust in their antivirus anyways.
@recursiverecursion Godot was not abused. What I understand:
What actually happened: Bad actors realized that they could use Godot to code Malware that is not detected by antivirus software. They create open source tools on Github (Cracks, Twitch manager for example, and 188 others), but that tool is a Malware coded in Godot that downloads and runs additional malicious software.
What could happen, but probably didn't: Bad actors could change the data of a Godot game, turning it into malware.
Storm in a teacup.
But this is bad news for game jams. Participants are not really trustworthy and those who do not build for HTML5 should not be evaluated.
A web version is often a requirement (in my limitted jam experience).
This has always been true. If you are downloading an exe off the internet, it can be malicious. I am amazed by the streamers and Youtubers that seem willing to run anything. When I gamejam, I only write games that work in the browser and I only test/rate games that do the same. Unless you have a quarantine machine purpose built for running unknown code, it is really the only option.
I mean... Every game you download and run can do almost anything on your computer, no matter what it's written in. It's just code.
My first C2 agent I made for our malware to use in Red Teamings was a Unity Engine headless server.
Official article about the incident: https://godotengine.org/article/statement-on-godloader-malware-loader/
