Gamers are being hacked through "advice" on Steam forums - following some recommendations is dangerous

Scammers gain trust and then strike.

The "Discussions" section (forum) on Steam is used by some players to find answers to their questions. Sometimes they turn to other community members for advice on how to fix a game – these people have become targets for scammers.

Attackers spread fake "solutions" on Steam forums. An unsuspecting user who decides to use them will end up installing a miner on their computer.

Bleeping Computer notes that recently, scammers have started targeting a wide variety of topics – from video game crashes to loss of items in Steam inventory and other technical issues.

Attackers join discussions and suggest opening PowerShell as an administrator (command line) and executing a command that supposedly solves the problem. In reality, an executable file (exe) of the XMRig miner is stealthily downloaded and launched on the victim's PC.

An example of such a malicious message:

Such attacks are called "ClickFix" – it's one of the social engineering tactics. It is effective because it offers users a "solution" to their problems. Outwardly, everything looks normal to an ordinary user.