People Playground, a Steam sandbox game about torturing or otherwise messing with innocent ragdolls that work like crash test dummies, has had its Steam Workshop disabled over a “malicious mod” peddling malware. That’s according to the game’s developer Mestiez, who’s urging anyone who played the game with mods on September 21st to run virus scans and has told everyone not to fire People Playground up until they’ve announced it’s safe to do so.
“You might have noticed the Workshop has disappeared again,” the developer announced in a Steam post on September 22nd. “I disabled it quite a few hours ago due to yet another malicious mod. This one is especially bad.”
They urged anyone who played People Playground with mods between 6PM and 8PM CEST on September 21st (that’s 5PM and 7PM BST) to run an anti-virus scan. “Delete all your mods in your mods folder and do not open the game until I’ve announced on Steam that it’s safe to do so,” Mestiez added. According to the developer, the malware can do anything from permanently wiping “a considerable amount of your personal data”, to vandalising your Steam config and Steam cloud data for other games, to publishing personal info from your Discord account to the Steam Workshop.
Mestiez previously wrote that the malware “DOES NOT steal your passwords, tokens, cookies, or other credentials”, but has since crossed that out and is suggesting folks who want to make sure they’re safe should probably “change the passwords of all [their] important accounts in order to invalidate any session tokens that could have been included.
They added that they see no use in speculating as to who unleashed the malware mod on People Playground, writing: “This is entirely my responsibility, and we gain nothing from throwing around rumours or speculations.” Kotaku report that this is the second time in a year People Playground has suffered a malware attack via a Steam Workshop mod. Back in February, a malicious mod messed with affected players’ files, contraptions folders, and mod lists for People Playground, prompting Mestiez to temporarily disable its Steam Workshop, as they’ve done again this time.
Here’s hoping the game can be a lot more secure in future. I’d certainly be having second thoughts about going back to it once it’s fixed or especially resuming modding it if I was a regular ragdoll torturer.