People Playground players are once again being warned about malicious Workshop content after the game’s developer discovered another infected mod. The situation appears to be particularly serious this time, with the developer temporarily disabling the Workshop and advising potentially affected players to scan their PCs and change their passwords.

According to an official update shared via Steam, titled “Bad event” with the subtitle “This is bad news,” players may be at risk if they had mods installed and opened People Playground on September 21 between 6 PM and 8 PM CEST. The developer has asked those players to run an antivirus scan, delete everything inside their mods folder, and avoid launching the game again until an announcement confirms that it is safe.

Workshop content for People Playground has been disabled

The Workshop itself has also been disabled for the time being. This prevents players from accessing its content while also stopping the malicious program from continuing to use the Workshop as part of its reported method of spreading.

The developer stressed that they still can’t say with certainty exactly what the malicious program did. However, their investigation suggests that the potential damage goes well beyond simply breaking People Playground or corrupting a few mods.

The malware may be capable of permanently deleting a considerable amount of personal data from an affected computer. It can also reportedly interfere with Steam configuration and Steam Cloud data belonging to other games, including Workshop and inventory information. This means the damage may not necessarily remain limited to People Playground.

There are privacy concerns as well. The developer initially said the malware could read a user’s Discord username and other identifiable information before publishing that data to the Workshop. More importantly, they later withdrew an earlier statement claiming that passwords, tokens, cookies, and other credentials weren’t being stolen.

Because of that uncertainty, players who may have been affected are now being told to change their Discord password as soon as possible. The developer also recommends changing passwords for other important accounts as a precaution, which can help invalidate session tokens that may have been exposed.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first malware incident involving the People Playground Workshop. The game was targeted by another attack back in February, although that incident appeared to be less severe and primarily caused problems with game files and players’ mod lists. 

About the Author

Abdul Haddi

Abdul is a tech writer and Editor for PC Guide, specializing in all things tech, gaming, and hardware.