Pierluigi Paganini
August 06, 2018
Fortnite continues to be the most popular game, it is a co-op sandbox survival game developed by Epic Games and People Can Fly.
The great success obtained by the Fortnite attracted cyber criminals that are attempting to exploit its popularity to target its fans.
Unfortunately for Android users, Fortnite for Android devices is not available yet, it is currently under development while the iOS version was released in March by Epic Games.
In the recent months, crooks attempted to take advantage of Android users’ interest in an alleged version for their devices of the popular game.
Experts discovered many blog posts and video tutorial with instructions to install fake Fortnite Android App.
Scammers are exploiting this interest to trick Android fans into downloading tainted version of the game that can compromise Android devices.
Now there is a news for the Android fans of the popular game, Epic Games confirmed the Fortnite APK for Android will be available for download exclusively only through its official website and not through the official Google Play Store.
According to the Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney in this way, the company will have “have a direct relationship” with its consumers and will allow saving 30 percent fee that Google maintains when users download a software from the Play Store.
“The awesome thing about Fortnite is it’s brought a huge volume of digital commerce to Epic. We can now do that very efficiently. We can handle payment processing and customer support and download bandwidth with some great deals. We’re passing the savings along with the Unreal Engine Marketplace. We’ve change the royalty split from the 30/70 you see everywhere to developers getting 88 percent. We find that’s a great boon for developers.” Sweeney told GamesBeat.
Sweeney explained that the share of profits for the version running on Microsoft or Nintendo is right because the “enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers.”
Sweeney considers disproportionate 30% cut on the fee applied by Google for its services but evidently doesn’t evaluate the security features implemented by the Google store to avoid crooks will serve tainted versions of the Fortnite APK.
Even if in the past we have found several malicious apps uploaded to the Play Store, we cannot underestimate the Google’s efforts for the security of its users.
The availability of Fortnite APK on a third-party website could expose Android users to the risk of infection.
The only way to download an APK from a third-party store is to manually enable “Install Apps from Unknown Sources” option in the settings.
A large number of Android users will search “how to install Fortnite on Android,” these fans could be targeted in various ways, for example in black SEO campaigns devised to infect their devices.
“The move will simply encourage users to manually enable “Install Apps from Unknown Sources” option in the settings menu or accept a variety of Android security prompts in order to install Fortnite game directly from the Epic Games website.” reported The Hacker News.
“So, thousands of people out there searching, “how to install Fortnite on Android” or “how to download Fortnite APK for Android” on the Internet, could land themselves on unofficial websites, ending up installing malware.”
In order to install Fortnite on Android, players will have to download the Fortnite Launcher from the official Epic website, then it will allow them to load the Fortnite Battle Royale onto their devices.
Attackers can impersonate the legitimate source, for example by carrying out phishing campaign to trick Android users into downloading tainted version of Fortnite APK.
Stay Tuned …
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(Security Affairs – Fortnite APK, gaming)
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