‘Among Us’ Is Dealing With a Massive Spamming Situation
Last updated May 26, 2021
- Popular mobile game ‘Among Us’ is dealing with a spamming bot that has already affected 1.5 million games.
- The situation is still ongoing, as the mitigations weren’t effective enough to stop the spamming.
- ‘Among Us’ grew large quickly, and its indie developers didn’t have the time to scale up security on an equal level.
There’s a massive spam operation plaguing ‘Among Us’ right now, causing annoyance, disruption of the gaming experience, and unnecessary burden on the game’s servers. The spammers are using an “Eric Loris” theme, promoting a YouTube channel that is devoted to game cheats and hacks.
According to the estimates, the large-scale spam attack has affected 1.5 million games and 5 million players. The game developers have acknowledged the situation and assured the playerbase that they’re doing everything they can to contain the problem as soon as possible.
Besides calling users to subscribe to the YouTube channel (currently 11.1k subscribers), the spammers are also expressing their pro-Trump position. The spammers allegedly talked to Eurogamer through Discord, claiming that they achieved this massive operation on Among Us after they wrote a relatively simple bot that does the trick.
To keep the operation effective, they claim to operate a network of 50 volunteers. One of the servers offered by these volunteers sports 32 CPU cores, while the second-most-powerful features 16 cores. As the spammer claims, they already have a working bypass for the emergency patch that was meant to stop the attack, so this situation won’t be over soon.
InnerSloth, the game developer of Among Us, is struggling to cope with the situation as they are a small indie developer and not a large and powerful publisher. Thus, they have limited manpower and resources. Until they manage to deal with the situation decisively, they urge users to play private games with people they trust.
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Among Us is one of those rare cases of a game that gains popularity long after its initial release. In fact, InnerSloth was preparing Among Us 2 but decided to cancel it and focus on the first release instead when it suddenly gained so much popularity. That said, the team was already dealing with a massive and sudden user influx that required server infrastructure extension, and so this wasn’t the ideal time to deal with a spamming bot.
InnerSloth has a long way to go when it comes to securing their game, and with popularity comes increased risk. Hackers, spammers, and threat actors want to be heard, and the larger the audience, the better for them. Unfortunately, reporting the hacker on YouTube won’t do much, as the correlation between the channel owner and the spammer cannot be made, and the user isn’t doing anything wrong on the YouTube platform.
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