The Final Hours of Portal 2 Plagued by Malware

[Shawn Zipay]

The PC version of The Final Hours of Portal 2 has been temporarily pulled from the Steam store and from user's game listings after it was discovered it opened up a gateway to malware infections.

A discussion thread on the official Steampowered forums brought this security issue to light after users began to report that their antivirus software kept pegging the interactive behind the scenes digest as having malware and viruses. The issue is that The Final Hours of Portal 2 connects to a third party website in order to obtain some of its content.

The server and site that The Final Hours make use of was hacked into, and an embedded IFrame was added to redirect to a malicious website. So, as it turns out, any time you fired up The Final Hours, you were being redirected to another website and thus the download of malicious content to your home machine took place.

Valve has responded that they are taking down access to The Final Hours of Portal 2 while the company investigates. Hopefully the solution comes quickly, perhaps by simply storing the content on their own content servers instead of to an outside source.

You may want to scan your system with an anti-virus and anti-malware program if you have fired up The Final Hours of Portal 2 in the past few months. Better safe than sorry, right?

The reason why The Final Hours of Portal 2 needs to connect to a third party site is unclear. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the program was originally for iOS devices and was later simply ported over to the PC realm.

[Anarchy1]

Re: The Final Hours of Portal 2 Plagued by Malware

Hmm...my AV has been detecting some files in the Steam directory recently as malicious. I assumed they were just false positives, but maybe they aren't.