Epic Fail for Cross Days Pirates
Cross Days is a Japanese erotic visual novel developed by 0verflow, a Japanese video game division of Stack Ltd. specializing in the production of mature interactive fiction. You may not have heard about it in the western world, but in Japan Cross Days is quite popular. The game, which has numerous erotic elements, follows a story line – the player just has to watch and from time to time select, ignore, or click actions or responses. The player thus influences the plot, causing the game to branch.
The Cross Days game was released earlier this month to awaiting fans – fans that were willing to pay for it. Cross Days fans that were not willing to purchase the game paid in another way. You see, after the game was launched players turned to file-sharing networks to get the game. And because they did not pay attention to what they were doing, they downloaded malware instead of the Cross Days.
Okay, so users downloaded malware instead of a pirated version of the game. What happened next? When users tried to run the malware in disguise fake installer, they were presented with a made-up survey. The user was asked to provide personal information about himself, including email address and password for that email address. Once all this personal info was gathered, the malware uploaded it to a publicly available site where anyone can glance it over (see here).
Here comes the funny part. The malware pretended to be the installer for the Cross Days game, right? Once launched, the malware presented the user with a terms of service agreement, the kind you see every time you want to install an application. The funny bit is that in the terms of service, the malware clearly stated it would expose the user’s private data.
Still, it’s better than the virus released by malware writers onto Japanese file-sharers in 2007. That virus actually threatened to kill them.
The Cross Days game was released earlier this month to awaiting fans – fans that were willing to pay for it. Cross Days fans that were not willing to purchase the game paid in another way. You see, after the game was launched players turned to file-sharing networks to get the game. And because they did not pay attention to what they were doing, they downloaded malware instead of the Cross Days.
Okay, so users downloaded malware instead of a pirated version of the game. What happened next? When users tried to run the malware in disguise fake installer, they were presented with a made-up survey. The user was asked to provide personal information about himself, including email address and password for that email address. Once all this personal info was gathered, the malware uploaded it to a publicly available site where anyone can glance it over (see here).
Here comes the funny part. The malware pretended to be the installer for the Cross Days game, right? Once launched, the malware presented the user with a terms of service agreement, the kind you see every time you want to install an application. The funny bit is that in the terms of service, the malware clearly stated it would expose the user’s private data.
Still, it’s better than the virus released by malware writers onto Japanese file-sharers in 2007. That virus actually threatened to kill them.
