Hackers have managed to steal $6 million worth of CS:GO skins from a popular trading website.
Skins in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are serious business. So much so that there are dedicated third-party marketplaces for buying, selling, and trading these virtual items online. But, last week, one of the most prominent of these sites was targeted by hackers. As spotted by AFK Gaming, these individuals managed to hack the website CS.Money on August 13 and steal a whopping $6,000,000 worth of CS:GO skins.
Shortly after the breach, CS.Money posted on Twitter that it had been the target of a cyber attack and that the website has now been temporarily taken offline. "We will fix the issue and will do our best to restore the normal functioning of the website," the company said.
According to a post by CS. Money's head of public relations, Timofey Sobolevky, the hackers gained access to the site's bots by stealing Mobile Authenticator files, which are used for Steam authorization. That allowed them to send outgoing transfer offers as well as transfer the skins to themselves.
"At first they only sent the skins to themselves, but later they mixed it up by sending offers to regular users, popular bloggers and traders," explains Sobolevky. "We believe it was done to hide their tracks, divert our attention, and drag more innocent people in this skin-stealing scheme of theirs."
All in all, the thieves managed to pull off around 1,000 trades with approximately 100 user accounts. "The CS.Money team is now struggling in attempts to reset our password and MA files to invalidate the compromised authorization data" Sobolevky says. "At the same time, we're doing our best to secure all the data critical to our services." At the time of writing, the site is still down with no indication of when it will be up and running again.
