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GMC Moderators Neglect Infected Program?

Alarm bells: ESET blocks the link.

A Game Maker creation, released under the ‘Tools & Applications’ section of the Game Maker Community, was not been dealt with by staff at the website for several days despite alarm from users at the forum.

“Easy Ragdoll v1.0” was published by GMC member Locknar, who released the program on the 7th of December, the same day he joined the website. He has denied that the file, a corrupt Windows executable that reportedly fails to run, was intentionally infected with a malicious trojan.

The file was reported as infected by multiple virus scanners and firewalls including ESET Smart Security, and online service Virus Total. It was tested by GMC member Dylan93 who alerted topic viewers of the potential dangers. A witness to the topic YellowAfterlife warned the virus may have password stealing capabilities.

The file was reported by at least two GMC members shortly after it was posted by Locknar. However even after three days since its release, the topic and its link remained publically visible, potentially leaving users browsing the subforum risk. There was no response from any moderators in the topic.

Mike Dailly, a well known programmer and developer at YoYo games, acknowledged it was “very easy to see it’s not a GameMaker .exe” given its small size of just 250k. Although it is primarily moderators who should be handling such an issue, Mr. Dailly removed the file and dealt with the situation immediately after we contacted him.

“As to .EXEs on any forum, you always have to take your own precautions.

“… until HTML5 and browser tech is the standard, anyone wanting to share games will need to share .EXEs, and users will just have to take care.” Mr. Dailly said.

Aside from logging into his account, Locknar had not shown any further activity since the 7th of December, the very day he joined and released the corrupt file. He has since had his posts removed and been flagged as a spammer.

What do you think?

8 Comments

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  1. What greg said.

    Also, the yoyogames sandbox is excellent for that purpose. Although I doubt it’s fool-proof, it gives an element of assurance that the game is legit. I actually rarely try games these days unless it’s from someone I know, or it’s on yoyogames.

  2. “… until HTML5 and browser tech is the standard, anyone wanting to share games will need to share .EXEs, and users will just have to take care.”

    Hmm, how about that little known ‘tech’ called Flash?

  3. Although my job is to make sure viruses like these don’t come up in the Mac side of the community, I think it’s very unreasonable to expect that the staff play every single game in the GMC, looking for viruses.

    If you encounter something that looks like a virus, report it and rest assured we’ll take a look.

    • I think the point the author is making, is that despite being reported multiple times it was still not removed after nearly a week. No one expects mods to “play every single game in the GMC” – the difference is this one was reported…this shows how little attention the mod (for that area) is paying to the position.

      Personally, I’ve felt like the admin/mod presence has been pretty lacking the past 3-6 months, excluding Nocture, ugriffin and Takagi…the Reviewers Forum in particular has just died and no one is taking responsibility for it. Disappointing!

      There need to be some new mods added to the team, IMO.

    • True Valhalla :I think the point the author is making, is that despite being reported multiple times it was still not removed after nearly a week. No one expects mods to “play every single game in the GMC” — the difference is this one was reported…this shows how little attention the mod (for that area) is paying to the position.
      Personally, I’ve felt like the admin/mod presence has been pretty lacking the past 3-6 months, excluding Nocture, ugriffin and Takagi…the Reviewers Forum in particular has just died and no one is taking responsibility for it. Disappointing!
      There need to be some new mods added to the team, IMO.

      Well, tbh I can’t see the Windows creations forum reports (as I’m not a mod there), but I’m confident that those who can would’ve taken action after a week.

      In any case, not sure about a lacking presence… most of the mods that I know have been active, Sinaz did just recently retire but aside from them I’ve seen them logged in these past weeks.

  4. Spammers like this give us a bad name >_< I remember when hacker101 was touting a web browser he claimed he'd built with GM – turned out he'd used V C#.
    Why not implement a minimum filesize check?

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