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A comment on “fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and modpacks.

Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by afarviral on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @07:30PM (#36235132)
This is highly annoying/intentional timing as Minecraft 1.20 just got released but now it is tainted with fears of viruses and extra steps to mitigate. For a friend who streams minecraft content and relies on the income this is a big setback and extra-risky for them if their account secrets are stolen.
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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by aetherspawn on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @07:36PM (#36235187)
You could play the game/mods on a burner PC or in a VM and do everything else, such as access your accounts, from a different computer.

Also would be surprised if a commercial AV like Bitdefender doesn’t pick this malware up.

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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by BGINBarbarian on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @08:01PM (#36235368)
There are scripts written by mod devs, and curseforge (the platform where mods are updated) to detect it, so that's useful.
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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by dmonitor on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @07:51PM (#36235303)
Just play vanilla for now, I guess

I thought it took a hot minute to get mods updated anyway

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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by BGINBarbarian on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @08:03PM (#36235380)
Many smaller mods updated quickly. This is a) because this is not a very large update, and b) because Minecraft has pre releases and release candidates which are practically the same as the final release, so the mod can be updated before the final release of the version.

Also, many mods are necessary for performance reasons, due to vanilla's performance being questionable at times.

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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by George83728 on Thursday June 08, 2023 @12:55AM (#36237392)
A lot of people use accessibility mods that suck to go without. Not having ItemScroller causes me physical pain after just a few minutes of clicking around in chests.

I'm just going to stick with 1.19 and the mods I downloaded several months ago until this matter is sorted out.

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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by mr_00ff00 on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @08:35PM (#36235609)
Maybe this is a dumb suggest, but what about using a VM or second computer?

I’m not a malware expert by any means, but I am pretty sure VMs are extremely hard for malware to escape when it isn’t expecting it.

And VMs take almost no technical skill to set up nowadays.

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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by squeaky-clean on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @08:40PM (#36235655)
It's been years since I've done it so maybe it's much better now, but getting games to run properly in a VM was a huge hassle for me. In the best cases 3d acceleration was slow, often it just wouldn't work at all.
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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by mr_00ff00 on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @08:46PM (#36235691)
ehh I didn’t think of that.

Still though, isn’t Minecraft streaming mostly single player? I assumed latency is the big concern with VMs.

Although I also have very little gaming experience, I can imagine for very good players even slight delays are widely noticeable.

but btw Minecraft is Java, right? So technically it’s on a VM anyway lol. (I know, not really the same, making a joke)

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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by circuit10 on Thursday June 08, 2023 @03:53AM (#36238593)
It’s not better now, unless you can do GPU passthrough
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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by gibspaulding on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @11:02PM (#36236652)
A second computer is actually a pretty typical setup for streaming. One PC actually runs the game, and a capture card sends the audio/video output to a second PC that runs your streaming software.

Either way though, no matter how you sandbox Minecraft, at least your Minecraft account is going to be vulnerable.

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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by themoonisachees on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @11:10PM (#36236696)
VMs are no-go for gaming, unless you are willing to do dedicated gpus. Reminder that most people streaming minecraft do not know what a vm is to begin with :)

This wouldn't even be a good way to protect yourself, because the useful things are all tied to the game account, which would be inside the VM.

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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by kaba0 on Thursday June 08, 2023 @01:54AM (#36237771)
It really should not be too hard to put the whole thing into a sandbox where only select files can be accessed. But desktop OSs are way behind here.
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Re:“fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and... by SamuelAdams on Thursday June 08, 2023 @07:39AM (#36240203)
Windows 10 has built in sandboxing now, might be worth checking out. I’m not sure if it’s available on Home and Pro editions though.

Data does not persist though, so maybe create a setup script to install mods combined with cloud syncing for saving game state. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/applicati...

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