Team Xecuter was a group involved with making and selling modchips for video game systems. They often made mods that allowed the video game system to rip games or play pirated games. It was a crowd favorite in the modding scene. Until it all fell apart. The story of what happened to Team Xecuter must be heard to believe.This episode features Gary Bowser. You can find more about Gary here:https://twitter.com/Bowser_GaryOPAhttps://garyopa.com/https://www.gofundme.com/f/garyopa-restarting-his-life?utm_location=darknetdiariesSponsorsSupport for this show comes from Axonius. The Axonius solution correlates asset data from your existing IT and security solutions to provide an always up-to-date inventory of all devices, users, cloud instances, and SaaS apps, so you can easily identify coverage gaps and automate response actions. Axonius gives IT and security teams the confidence to control complexity by mitigating threats, navigating risk, decreasing incidents, and informing business-level strategy — all while eliminating manual, repetitive tasks. Visit axonius.com/darknet to learn more and try it free.Support for this show comes from Thinkst Canary. Their canaries attract malicious actors in your network and then send you an alert if someone tries to access them. Great early warning system for knowing when someone is snooping around where they shouldn’t be. Check them out at https://canary.tools.Support for this show comes from ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker has built-in endpoint security solutions that strengthen your infrastructure from the ground up with a zero trust posture. ThreatLocker’s Allowlisting gives you a more secure approach to blocking exploits of known and unknown vulnerabilities. ThreatLocker provides zero trust control at the kernel level. Learn more at www.threatlocker.com.Sourceshttps://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/10/27/ringleader-pleads-guilty-in-phone-fraud/56e551bb-a727-43e8-a3ca-1c1f4cf6ef82/https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao/legacy/2010/10/12/usab4304.pdfhttps://www.eurogamer.net/nintendo-to-appeal-not-guilty-judgement-of-flash-cart-sellers-7https://www.gamesindustry.biz/nintendo-pounces-on-global-piracy-outfithttps://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-members-notorious-videogame-piracy-group-team-xecuter-custodyhttps://medium.com/swlh/watch-paint-dry-how-i-got-a-game-on-the-steam-store-without-anyone-from-valve-ever-looking-at-it-2e476858c753#.z05q2nykchttps://www.lemonde.fr/police-justice/article/2022/05/27/voler-des-societes-qui-font-des-milliards-qu-est-ce-que-j-en-ai-a-faire-max-louarn-c-ur-de-hackeur_6127821_1653578.htmlhttps://www.theverge.com/2020/11/20/21579392/nintendo-big-house-super-smash-bros-melee-tournament-slippi-cease-desisthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sNIE5anpik
Full Episode
Okay, so I read about this story about a video game that I thought was interesting. So it starts out on Steam. Steam is a video game marketplace, right? And you can download Steam, and through there you can buy video games to play and stuff. It's a nice system. I like Steam because it provides a sort of standardized way to get games.
See, before this, games for the PC were just all over the internets. There was no central place to go other than your local GameStop. And you had no idea if the game you found on the internet was legit or not. It could have malware in it, or maybe it wasn't a complete game, or some weird knockoff pirated version.
Steam saw this problem too, and this is why they made the marketplace, and they developed a three-step process that all games must go through before they can be sold on Steam. First is that you have to submit your Steam page, then you have to submit your game for review, and then if those things are approved by Steam, you have the option to publish your game on their platform.
Yeah, well, someone looked at this and they were like, hmm, I wonder if I can get my game onto Steam without having to go through any of that process. So they made the most boring game you can think of called Watch Paint Dry. And yes, in fact, if you downloaded and installed this game, all you do is sit there and watch paint dry. Surely a game this stupid would be rejected by Steam.
Well, this game developer started going through the steps on how to get a game into Steam. They first created a developer's account and was going through the process. But during those steps on Steam's website, there were some questions, and one of them was a drop-down menu that asked, what stage your game is in?
Well, this person decided to try submitting some answers that weren't in the dropdown options, which returned some weird results. And using that information, they were able to send data to Steam saying, the game is currently published. They basically skipped the first two steps where Steam had to review it and just trick the website into thinking it was published. And sure enough, that worked.
The game was available on Steam for anyone to download. Watch Paint Dry bypassed all the checks to get onto Steam. It was there for like a whole day before they noticed it and took it down. Steam has fixed this problem, so you can't bypass it anymore. But it's an interesting exercise, isn't it?
To try to trick a video game marketplace to list your game as been reviewed and approved, which makes the users trust that this game is okay. There's a lot of trickery that goes on in the world of video games.
These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recider. This is Darknet Diaries.
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