More than 55 million men, women, and children play Minecraft in an average month. Many of those players enjoy using "mods," third party tools that further customize the game, to tweak things to their liking. Based on the numbers shown in the apps' descriptions, Symantec believes that somewhere between 600,000 and 2.5 million (primarily U.S.-based) Minecraft players installed the shady apps. Other gamers -- like the ones victimized by the malware Symantec found -- find themselves in the crosshairs simply because cybercriminals know just how popular mods and skins are. A simple Minecraft skinning app, for example, should never need to access your location data like this one did.

Source: Forbes October 20, 2017 11:37 UTC