Quote:A proprietor of a Counter-Strike gaming server promotion service has used multiple zero-days in the Counter-Strike client to create a large botnet. The network is made up of fake game servers for the popular online multiplayer game.
 
The attacker has had quite a bit of success. In a recent analysis, a whopping 39 percent of all existing Counter-Strike 1.6 (CS 1.6) game servers seen online were found to actually be malicious, according to Dr. Web.
 
According to its owner Valve, worldwide there are 300 million players of Counter-Strike, a first-person shooter game in which teams of terrorists try to mount an attack and counter-terrorists try to prevent it.

While Counter-Strike 1.6 is an older version that hasn’t been under active development for years, according to researchers the number of players using official CS 1.6 clients reaches an average of 20,000 clients online at any one time. So this still represents a fertile field for cybercriminals to grow their nefarious activities.

Most people still playing CS1.6 have been camping at bomb site B for over 10 years.
— Nick Carr (@ItsReallyNick) March 14, 2019