One of the largest platforms for selling game skins for CS:GO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive), CS.MONEY, has reported a hack. The work of the resource was temporarily stopped, as the attackers managed to steal about 20,000 items, whose total cost was approximately 6,000,000 US dollars.
Let me remind you that we also wrote that Malicious Packages from PyPi Arrange DDoS Attacks on Counter-Strike Servers.Bleeping Computer notes that CS.MONEY is one of the largest marketplaces of its kind, offering 1696 unique skins for 53 types of weapons, whose assets are estimated at $16,500,000 in total (after the attack – $10,500,000).
The hacking of the site became known on August 13, 2022 from an official message on the platform’s Twitter account. The administration reported that the resource was temporarily disabled due to a hacker attack and promised to resume the site in the near future.
Unfortunately, CS.MONEY has not yet been able to return to work, and the affected users have not been able to return the items stolen from them. At the same time, representatives of the resource claim that they have already agreed with the administrators of other trading platforms, identified 20,000 stolen skins, and now the stolen items cannot be easily resold in other places.
Timofey Sobolevsky
A detailed story about the incident has already been published by Timofey Sobolevsky, head of the CS.MONEY PR department. According to him, the hackers were somehow able to access the Mobile Authenticator (MA) files that are used to log in to Steam.
Thanks to this, the attackers took control of the accounts of 100 bots that “stored” marketplace skins, and then carried out about a thousand transactions, transferring items to their accounts (and not only). So, at first, the attackers sent skins to themselves, but after a while they began to conduct random transactions, sending items to ordinary users, well-known sellers and bloggers who had nothing to do with the attack.
Presumably, in this way the hackers tried to cover their tracks and complicate the attribution of the attack. Another attempt to deceive the platform specialists who will be investigating was to create many fake messages mentioning various third-party marketplaces in order to hide the true source of the problem.
When the administration of the resource discovered a sharp decrease in the number of items and received messages from several users who were worried about suspicious trade offers, CS.MONEY tried to immediately stop the attack, but by this time, skins totaling $ 6,000,000 had already been stolen.
In addition, CS.MONEY representatives tweeted yesterday that they are willing to pay $100,000 for detailed information about the hack.
The media noted that Valve, which owns Steam, may cancel the transfer of items if it decides that the situation requires intervention. However, it is not known whether Valve will take this step, although the gaming giant has done similar things in the past.
