On 27 September, Rovio, the firm behind the hit game Angry Birds, launched a new puzzle game Bad Piggies. A paid version is available for the iPhone and iPad, and a free on Google Play for Android phones. Bad Piggies quickly became very popular, hitting the top spot in the App Store in about three hours, and still keeping that position two weeks later.
So the game is immensely popular throughout the world, although it can only be played on Apple and Android devices. This effectively has left a gap in the market.
It seems now that illegitimate versions of Bad Piggies are disseminated through Google Chrome web store. In fact, these are not versions of the new game, but plugins that have “Bad Piggies” in their game description, so that they would match your search criteria.
Over 80 000 people so far have risen to the bait and downloaded these free apps.
Many of them originate from a mysterious maker of free flash games, playook.info. What is worse, though, is that installing some of these plugins requires you to give permission to the plugin to “access your data on all websites”, as online security company Barracuda Networks reports.
What happened in the Barracuda test is that the game installed a plugin that started displaying additional ads in many popular websites. Users who let the plugin do its business run the risk of getting their browsers hijacked.
When these users are browsing the internet with Chrome, the plugin transmits their web data to the creators of the plugin, allowing them to steal and sell the user’s personal information, such as email addresses and online credit card information.
As Google Chrome is quickly becoming “the only way to surf the web”, it would be nice to trust its capabilities in protecting its users from malware, too.
Also, the incident tells us something about the lure of games, and about using games as bait. It seems that the pull of a new hit game is so immense that people want to be involved in playing it, no matter what.
