Hello dreamers.

An artist I follow was recently caught by the Try-My-Game Scheme on Discord. This is the current most popular way to trick people into downloading a ransomware virus through Discord, but this artist had somehow avoided being informed of it up to this point.

The Try-My-Game Scheme is simple. Somebody messages you out of the blue asking to test out their new game. This might be a friend of yours who you didn't know was making a game (i.e. they got hacked.) Usually there will be no information about the game, sometimes they steal the name and promo assets of an existing game. You download it and your PC gets taken over, all your personal info is stolen, and you're being pressed to pay hundreds of dollars to some loser script kiddie. Which is of course very distressing and downright embarrassing.

There are a few habits you can adopt to protect yourself from this sort of trick:
• Immediately close DMs from unknown people with links. Don't even reply. Mute or block if they're persistent. Also check your common servers and let the admins of those servers know about it.
• If a potentially-hacked friend sends a game, ask intuitive questions about what the game is about. Even with stolen assets, the crook probably won't be able to describe it, and will keep pressuring you to "just try it bro" or whatever. Also, they will usually be really bad at talking the way your friend does.
• Instead of clicking their link, open the browser yourself and search for the game. If they stole a game's identity, then you'll get the real game and not their version... Probably.
• When in doubt, just don't download the damn "game" in any event.

I did some research today to learn more about the technical and logistic aspects of this.

You may be surprised to hear there's such a thing as "malware-as-a-service". That is, somebody programs a virus, and they rent it out to moron script kiddies who then send it to decent folks to recoup the costs with extortion and selling their personal info. This Discord scheme uses malware-as-a-service. I've found the names BbyStealer, AgeoStealer, and NovaStealer in connection to this scheme. There are probably several others.

These are all RATS, or Root Access Trojans. Trojans are among the worst viruses to have because once they get in, you'll have a hell of a time getting them back out. You often have to wipe the entire drive and reinstall the OS, and if you don't actually wipe wipe the drive you might still have the damn trojan after that too.

If you're affected by a virus like this, not only do you need to regain access to and reset the passwords for all of your accounts, you'll also need to keep an eye on your finances and be ready to report as soon as an unauthorized charge hits. Maybe set up your accounts right away to require more authorization for your payments for a while. Maybe request a new card with a new number.

In the olden days, scammers were almost respectable. They had to do the work themselves. They even hacked people through the phone before the Internet ever existed. Now they're losers who pay smarter people to make viruses for them. There's no honor among thieves, I guess.