Gamers Beware: Hearthstone bots may come with malware

Ugh, bots. It doesn’t matter which game they show up in, they’re annoying to play with. In Hearthstone, you can find software that claims to get you free dust or gold or botting apps that will play the game for you. But beyond being against Blizzard’s terms of service, there’s another problem with these third-party Hearthstone apps: according to a report by Symantec, they can infect your computer with malware.

Any software that doesn’t come from a known source can be dangerous to download and run, but Symantec has spotted two pieces of Hearthstone-related malware in the wild. The first is a trojan called Coinbitclip, seen in dust and gold hacking software, which steals Bitcoin. The second, and more dangerous, is a backdoor called Breut which sends all of your keystrokes to the attacker — potentially giving them passwords, credit card numbers, and more.

So be sure to stay safe while playing: avoid third party apps, keep your antivirus up to date, and be sure to secure your Battle.net account with an authenticator.