The hit game Among Us has been hit with a hack that both advertises a streaming channel and sends a political message. The studio InnerSloth was forced to issue a hasty patch in response to the hacks.
The hack would spam text chat messages advertising a streamer and threatening to damage your phone if you don’t subscribe. It ended with a “TRUMP 2020” message. The hack became widespread rather quickly, with some players estimating it had afflicted hundreds or even thousands of matches.
InnerSloth issued a statement via Twitter saying it was “super duper aware” of the issue. It announced an emergency server update and encouraged players to stick to private games in the meantime. Programmer Forest Willard later explained that the update had taken some time so as to avoid false positives, to prevent the game from wrongly identifying a hack.
Hello everyone,
We’re are super duper aware of the current hacking issue and we’re looking into it. We will be pushing out an emergency server update so people who are in game will get kicked from games. Please play private games or with people that you trust!!! Bare with us!! 😰— InnerSloth (@InnerslothDevs) October 23, 2020
“I was curious to see what would happen, and personally I found it funny,” the hacker, identified as Eris Loris, told Kotaku. “The anger and hatred is the part that makes it funny. If you care about a game and are willing to go and spam dislike some random dude on the internet because you can’t play it for 3 minutes, it’s stupid.”
Loris also confirmed he’s a supporter of President Trump, explaining the political element of the hack. He also said the recent success of Among Us means InnerSloth is big enough to hire more developers to prevent hacks like his. He says the hotfix has not stopped his bots entirely, but reports of the hack appear to have gone down.
Among Us became a surprise sensation, having been out for more than two years before it suddenly gained popularity. That boom of popularity has attracted the attention of streamers, along with political outreach from the likes of U.S. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, whose recent Among Us stream raked in over 430,000 viewers.
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