One of the trending games on stream platforms Among Us has been a target of hackers. It comes just three days after Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez live-streamed her game session that attracted over 400,000 viewers on Twitch. The hacker spammed chat boxes asking to vote for Donald Trump and threatened to damage phones if the gamers didn't subscribe to an advertised channel.
The online multiplayer game Among Us has had a rise in popularity with over 5.5 million active players. On Twitch, when Ocasio-Cortez streamed her game to urge people to vote, it became the third-highest viewed stream on Twitch with a peak of 439,000 simultaneous viewers. A total of over 700,000 viewers tuned in to watch AOC's hit game-cum-political rally session in support of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Spam Attack
Through the game stream, AOC targeted the young audience of the U.S. As per recent polls, the target audience is likely to favor Biden. With AOC also coming from the young generation, she became an instant hit. But hit stream apparently hasn't gone down well among a Trump supporter. The hacker, who went by the name Eris Loris, targeted the Among Us players with spam messages through the game's chat function.
While the exact goal of the hacker isn't clear, the spamming messages were to take a jab at young voters. The spam messages contained a Discord channel, YouTube channel and a link to a website named "methamphetamine.solutions". On those platforms, the hacker had set up videos for game cheats.
Loris, the hacker told Kotaku that it was his aim to troll Among Us gamers. "I was curious to see what would happen, and personally I found it funny. The anger and hatred are the part that makes it funny. If you care about a game and are willing to go and spam dislike some random dude on the internet because you can't play it for 3 minutes, it's stupid," Loris said in a direct message.
He added that since he was a Trump supporter, he included the "Trump 2020" in the spam message. But he doesn't have any remorse for the hack. "Among Us may be a small developer team, but that's not my fault. The game is at a scale bigger than most [triple-A] games. There is nothing stopping them from getting more developers, so the 'it's 3 people' reasoning means nothing to me," he added.
Patch Released
InnerSloth, the game developer later confirmed the hack in a tweet and issued a server update to fix the issue. However, Loris said that the new fix didn't stop his bots to infiltrate game lobbies. But there hasn't been any report of the spams repeating again.
"We're are super duper aware of the current hacking issue and we're looking into it," InnerSloth said in a Thursday tweet. "We will be pushing out an emergency server update so people who are in game will get kicked from games. Please play private games or with people that you trust!!! Bare with us!!" the game studio said.
