Following the news that Discord, a free VoIP service designed for gaming communities, has had its chat servers abused to host malware, Troy Gill, manager of security research at AppRiver commented below.
Troy Gill, Manager of Security Research at AppRiver:
“This is a case of attackers leveraging an existing services infrastructure to host and distribute their own malicious software. It appears that since the gaming community is the main consumer of this service, they are in turn the ones being targeted. However, this attack vector poses a risk to corporate networks as well given that it leads to a malware install on the target’s machine which could in many cases be an employee accessing this service from the network.
“Gamers actually using the service need to exercise greater caution when utilizing Discord. Since this poses a threat to any organization where an employee may access this service from a network connected device, they too should take precautions. Blocking access to gaming sites via your Web filter is one approach that should certainly be considered in addition to other standard security best practices.
“Since this threat could lead to a variety of malware types the mitigation is the same as with all malware generally speaking. Ideally, prevention is the best approach. Then, of course, detection and removal of the compromised machine. “
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