Pirate StarCraft II, Get A Free Virus

Karma can catch up with you pretty quick. Those eager to get their hands on Blizzard’s latest opus, StarCraft II, via unsavoury means may be in for a surprise. Microsoft has warned that pirated copies of the genre-defining RTS game can contain malware. Many of the infected files have been found on BitTorrent trackers and warez websites.

The problem lies in a couple of files contained in the game’s executable file.

According to Andrey Saygo and Francis Tan Seng of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, there are two questionable files they found.

One is “WinUpdate.exe” which tries to load other malware by “injecting code into different processes”. The other file is “StarCraft.2.Wings.Of.Liberty.CLONEDVD-WW TRAINER.exe” which is a Rebhip.A worm. It can steal important and private information like passwords by logging keystrokes.

StarCraft II isn’t the first eagerly anticipated game to get this sort of treatment. Other high profile releases like Windows 7 and Office 2010 have also seen their pirated versions infected.

[via Softpedia]