Apparently, hackers are trying to distribute a virus through the Super Mario movie that is supposed to read users’ data.
In April 2023, the Super Mario Bros. movie by Illumination Entertainment and Nintendo was released. In the following weeks, the film celebrated massive successes, even becoming the highest-grossing video game adaptation of all time, and Jack Black’s song for the movie was stuck in everyone’s head for days.
However, there were also curious headlines around the new movie, such as when it was suddenly posted on Twitter and millions of users suddenly watched Mario’s adventures there.
Now there is a new development involving unwanted copies: Apparently, hackers are currently trying to distribute Trojans with illegal downloads of the movie.
Users expect the movie, get data-stealing Trojan
What’s going on? As Axios and ReasonLabs report, hackers have apparently attached malware to illegal downloads of the Mario movie. This first occurred when the film leaked on Twitter on April 30.
According to the ReasonLabs report, this virus has reportedly been used more than 150,000 times to read data from users who have illegally downloaded current movies – such as the Mario movie – from the internet. However, this number only refers to the user group of ReasonLabs, according to the report – globally, millions of users could be affected.
What does the virus do? According to Axios, there is a file hidden in the movie’s download folder that installs a browser extension that activates as soon as you reopen it. Specifically, Google Chrome is said to be affected.
Then the virus searches for passwords, bank data, and similar information that may be stored in the browser. In the worst case, this can become really, really expensive.
However, as Axios points out, this is not the first time such an attack has been carried out via illegal movie or music downloads. Therefore, one should always keep in mind that unwanted data can also end up on your PC when downloading movies from unofficial sources.
Overall, with a bit of bad luck, it can quickly happen on the internet that you fall victim to hackers and their malware. In 2022, for example, there was a crazy case where a space image was used for data theft.
