The idea is to answer “No” at step 2 (“ask if”) and live happily ever after.
Steam games are not safe from malware, there were multiple instances where people complianed in reviews that game installs services they dislike. One example is Easy Anti-Cheat.
Regarding game trust - if the game ever asks for elevated privileges, that’s a warning flag. However even without those it can wipe out all your documents. So your only hope is signature from trusted party.
This form of spreading malware is called “social engineering” and the only thing one can do about this is education and raising awareness.
It worked for past approaches to the point they became memes everyone’s laughing about. Which reminds me, that cousin in Nigeria is still waiting for my $5,000 downpayment so I can get my share of his heritage amounting to over a million can you believe that???
No.
But they’ll find new ways every so often. It’s a cat an mouse game.
id like to think webgl was immune but the honest truth is, nothing is. the fact that people can/have embedded malware in pictures and so on just proves frankly nothing is safe. Back in the late 80s early 90s a computer magazine that put out a cd on the front cover got hammered when it turned out the cd have a virus on it… People had stupidly believed read only media was safe, well, it is, in that as long as it was clean when it went on, it stays clean, but if you burn a virus on, well, its on there now…
Everyone wants a bargin, everyone wants to feel special, so if they get a chance at an “early” copy, or to be paid for (allegedly) or, anything people will fall for it… I fear its going to be a long time before they stop falling for it.
My very first computer magazine (for Apple at that) came with a floppy disk with demos. One of them was ransomware which locked up the computer for money. How no one tested that before shipping thousands of copies is beyond me.
No matter the requested rights, Windows still gives that stupid warning regarding lack of signature.
Everyone who plays games from itch.io at least regularly should be used to it. But a newcomer will be frightened.
As for that scam issue, yeah it’s a real thing. I received such a message from a friend who got hacked as well. It sucks big time for game devs. Probably the only solution is to regularly mention that you work on a project so it’s not feeling like “suddenly I’m a game dev” when you do actually ask friends to be testers…
Discord itself closes their eyes in front of issues like these for some reason (and they reduced some workforce recently anyways). They don’t even act against easily auto-detectable spam (like a bot posting the same msgnin 10 channels within 10 seconds).
Sorry, but I stopped reading here because the average person on reddit is just a karma seeking idiot. I visit reddit as it’s taken over for forums for most communities but you have to be extremely doubtful of anything posted there because most people are just there farming for likes. Trends on reddit don’t really mean anything.
You can say that about pretty much any source, nowadays, though.
But it doesn’t matter. I also found a bunch of videos on it and watched in real-time as a Discord server was being taken over and the mods couldn’t do anything about it. Make of that what you will.
No. It’s far worse for reddit than any other community. Because of how large reddit is and how many people are on it you can’t figure out who has a good reputation and who doesn’t. With most communities you can know most of the major people and know for example that someone has a tendency to respond a certain way to a certain topic.
You can have that removed by purchasing an EV (Extended Validation) Code Signing signature. Once applied it will alert the user on install if the application has been compromised. You still have to verify that your code is safe and doesn’t accidentally have a virus but this will safeguard it once it leaves your hands.
Here are the companies that I’ve heard of but there are others too.
This isn’t “new” and has been happening for over a year and a half now. Despite this, it’s still possible to get testers for games. This isn’t the “end of trust.”
I believe you’re talking about a different warning.
Windows gives gives warning for downloaded exe files and msi. The idea is not to use those, but archives. Extract the archive and run. I’ve never seen a warning on archive contents extracted with 7zip.
Then there’s an entirely separate issue when exe requests elevated rights to write into admin-protected folder. That one should not be ignored and is a red flag. Several steam games in fact trigger this, but it becomes less and less common.
Few hundred dollars each year are not that easy for an indie and not sure whether you can easily apply the same certificate to as many updates as you want…
Microsoft automatically tracks opened executables and after enough people opt to open regardless of the warning they mark it as safe. I run into it on occasion but it requires me to be running an app that’s really unusual.
