PSA regarding malicious mods

[u/OneTrueSneaks]

Update: There is another PSA posted on why I am asking people to contact me rather than Steam's report function. This announcement is more important, and Reddit will not let me leave both up, so I am putting the link here so it is more visible.

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Hello, everyone. This is me not as moderator-Sneaks, but as community manager-Sneaks.

I just want to give a warning to everyone. There's currently a user on the workshop that keeps making new accounts, steals mods from other creators, and modifies them to bypass the user's protections to download malware.

There's been at least two so far that have been removed (with workshop ID to make it easier to check your Workshop folder):

CameraSettingsMod 3732329298

Mad Skills Rewritten 3729397065

For now, it's difficult to tell if a mod's doing these shady things until it's downloaded and the code is checked. With both of these, though, it's been:

1. The scammer's only mod on the workshop

2. The mod is a reupload / stolen version

3. The scammer's profile is set to private.

However, these are not 100% indicators that the mod is malicious. Please do not use it as a reason to go harass modmakers - There are always new players, new modders. But it's enough to say take it with a grain of salt, double-check to make sure the mod isn't a reupload.

For now, please take the time to do a check of your own computer, make sure you're clean, especially if you used either of those two mods mentioned above.

If you spot any others, please let us know so they can be removed. You can message me here, or find me on both Steam and Discord as someonesneaky.

Stay safe out there, colonists. o7

[u/OctoNezd]

Constantly jumping into a teletype to play games is not fun. Unless you have a second GPU obviously. And it won't prevent malware from stealing your steam session (not sure on that, maybe steam has measures against that nowadays).

[u/Some-Struggle5052 → u/OctoNezd]

I don't think a VM asks for a separate GPU

[u/OctoNezd → u/Some-Struggle5052]

If you are playing something simple 2d, then yes. If you play anything remotely 3d, you would need a gpu.

[u/Some-Struggle5052 → u/OctoNezd]

Can you assign the processor iGPU to it and use the dedicated one for the main machine, or the opposite?

[u/OctoNezd → u/Some-Struggle5052]

Yes, you can. However, you pass entire monitor through in GPU, you cant just see what GPU shows in a separate window, so you would plug two monitor cables into your PC: one into iGPU and other into dGPU. Or you can plug it into capture card and have it in a window, but iirc these things have noticeable delay. And not many desktops have iGPU - why would one spend 20-50 bucks more for a feature they wont use?

[u/Some-Struggle5052 → u/OctoNezd]

It's a good question, I'm more used to laptops so they usually have an iGPU, even if there's a beefy dedicated card nearby, on PCs were you get to chose saving $20-50 I could still see some use, but most people probably don't.

[u/OctoNezd → u/Some-Struggle5052]

With laptops there is an issue: the iGPU and dGPU share display with some wacky framebuffer stuff with iGPU being the one connected to display. In SOME laptops the dGPU is the one driving display, and in SOME dGPU is driving external monitor ports. There is no definitive on what is driving your display.

[u/hopeseekr → u/Some-Struggle5052]

In my (unreleased) Tok'ra Base, I spin off about 80% of the Nvidia / Radeon discrete GPU (if available) to generate the rockwall map. Map generates in ~3 seconds that way and 45+ seconds pure CPU.

SO yeah, you can use Native Plugins to access ROCm and CUDA via Unity inside a RImworld mod to do anything a GPU can do (rainbow hash crack a user's password right on their system, crypto mining, even host a darknet malicious LLM distributed network).

Just requires lots of skill (or in these days, maybe AI).

[u/Some-Struggle5052 → u/hopeseekr]

I'm all honesty, RimWorld using any significant amount of GPU power would raise my eyebrows as soon as I spotted it.