A PUBG Fan Really Loves The Game, Creates Ransomware To Force Others To Play It

Normally, ransomware is a tool intended to hold someone’s device or data hostage until they pay the price or “ransom” being asked. What doesn’t normally happen is someone creating a software that holds a user’s device hostage until they play a certain video game. This is exactly what happened with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, however, with what seems to be a fan tribute that just went too far.

Appropriately called PUBG Ransomware, it basically installs a .PUBG extension that will infect files and lock them behind an encryption unless specific steps are taken. It was first discovered by the MalwareHunter Team and reported by BleepingComputer.

Naturally, the ransomware is demanding for the owner of the device to purchase and download PUBG and then install it. Once this is done, the software will automatically detect the presence of the game and unlocks the files it was keeping hostage.

Alternatively, the user could just copy the restore code and use that to unlock the files, which is available right there on the screen. Basically, the person who made the ransomware would have succeeded in adding yet another PUBG player to the tens of millions already in the community or just inconvenienced someone for a few minutes.

As PC Mag notes, this is one of the extremely rare instances where a ransomware would infect a computer and not cause either lasting damage or financial issues. In terms of the severity of the impact of the incident, it comes nowhere near the implications of some of the more recent ransomware attacks that dominated last year’s headlines.

More to the point, this should be considered a good thing by many since it shows how vulnerable their computers are without the event causing any lasting damage. Either they get to play one of the most popular video games out right now or they get to spend some time learning how coding works.