Fortnite has grown to boast 125 million players as of June this year and despite “wholesome streamers” such as Ninja the game is not without its miscreants.

To be more specific we’re talking about cheaters and how some cheaters appear to have downloaded malware instead of the aim-bot or currency generator they were looking for.

This news comes to us from Rainway an app that allows you to stream your games to a Mac or Chromebook.

On 26th June Rainway reported that it began receiving hundreds upon thousands of errors that appeared because something was attempting to contact a number of ad platforms. Trouble is Rainway doesn’t run ads.

Before long Rainway made the connection and realised that Fortnite players had unknowingly installed malware while trying to gain an edge on the competition.

The question the team wanted to answer was what app was causing the trouble.

“We finally found a match in a hack claiming to allow players to generate free V-Bucks and use an aimbot, two birds with one stone, how could someone resist?,” wrote Rainway app chief executive officer, Andrew Sampson, in a blog post.

Rainway then put the app in a sand-box and observed it installing a root certificate, changing the Windows proxy and routing all web traffic through itself. Basically the only winner from this incident is the hacker that had the bright idea of adding a man in the middle attack to an “innocent” piece of software.

The cheat software/malware has since been removed from the platform it was available from but Rainway reports it was downloaded 78 000 times.

The firm says it has put measures in place to counter a man in the middle attack should anybody attempt this again but Sampson has some good advice for prospective cheaters.

“While it should go without saying, I think you should not download random programs. An excellent personal security tip is that if something is too good to be true, you’re probably going to need to reformat your PC. It is hard to outright prevent people from being malicious, but that doesn’t mean its hard to prevent spreading,” says the exec.

In 2018 then cheating just simply isn’t worth it what with bans and now the threat of malware, we’ll just try being better at the game.