Greenlight games cloned on Steam to spread virus among buyers

It has emerged that five Steam Greenlight games were cloned over the weekend, with unsuspecting buyers being directed to a site hosting a Trojan virus.

Polygon reports that five games were posted by a new user called Bluebunny14, who appears to have paid Steam’s $100 Greenlight fee, all of which saw the entirety of their assets copied wholesale and all of which remained up for voting on Greenlight for many hours.

The Maze by Xain and Cloud Runner Studios’ Melancholy Republic were among the titles affected, with the latter issuing a DMCA takedown request for the cloned content.

Valve eventually removed all links to suspicious sites before pulling the cloned games completely.

"Community members alerted us of the situation over the weekend by flagging the content,” Valve’s Doug Lombardi said. Our Community Moderators responded quickly by removing all malicious links from the fake Greenlight material and then we banned the submissions. We are taking further steps to deal with anyone involved in posting the links.

We’d like to thank those who reported the issue in addition to our Community Moderators, and we encourage everyone to report any suspicious activity in the future by using the flag icon located throughout the Steam Community."