A Filipino user of League of Legends (LoL), one of the most popular multiplayer games on the Internet, reported to the gaming community that his computer had been compromised with a Coinhive miner after initiating the platform client , causing the PC minara Monero automatically and without your consent.
The complaint was published in the social network Reddit , where the user named u / estargonzapa informed that when the Garena customer started - platform that serves as support for the game in Southeast Asia, specifically in the countries of the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore - the antivirus on his computer detected a malware that turned out to be the Coinhive code , a tool that was consuming CPU resources to mine Monero.
The user finalized his complaint asking explanations to the authorities of LoL, specifically to the company that works as client -Garena- and to the company after the development of the game, Riot Games.
The users did not waste time and indicated Garena as the possible server contaminated with the Coinhive code , since not only the Filipino fanatics had experienced the ravages of the miner, but also all those who had connected through that client.
Soon after, the Garena executives published a statement on Facebook for the users of the platform, informing that the customer lobby had been modified to implement the JavaScript code of the undercover miner, thus activating mining processes that slowed down the computers, consuming its processing power.
The statement also confirmed that the platform's engineers eliminated that code, so that users are no longer exposed to Coinhive's covert mining.
However, some users believe that an apology is not enough, since there have been other irregularities with the platform. For example, the new Garena client has greater access to the computer and is constantly running through a process called GarenaPlatformService , which has administrator privileges and nobody seems to know what it is for.
In this sense, many users consider that the server is a "malware" or that the code could not have been modified without anyone from the Garena group noticing . "There have been a lot of publications here about Garena being malware," says one Reddit user.
On the other hand, some players believe that these are the consequences of Riot Games not having its own server in Southeast Asia. The company partnered with Garena some time ago to save the development of an infrastructure in Southeast Asia that would allow him to take the game to the fans of these latitudes, a situation that users believe considerably disadvantageous.
This is not the first time that an irregularity occurs with the Garena server, a platform that not only hosts League of Legends, but also other games. For example, network users recalled that in the past one of Garena's developers was discovered on the servers of Black Desert Online (BDO), another online game, buying things in the market before anyone else could.
In addition to Garena, Coinhive also has a bad reputation, since the JavaScript code mining tool has been used on a number of occasions to covertly mine on third-party computers without prior authorization. In this way, porn websites in China , government authorities and news portals have been at the center of the scandal when it is discovered that they have been using Coinhive to undermine their customers' computers.
