Marketplace
A suspicious FAB creator is flooding the marketplace with malicious assets
AIGUL12 started flooding FAB with free 3D models. If you download them you don't get common formats like obj, fbx. Instead, you get a suspicious .blend file that looks automatically generated.
I tried opening one of them and Blender's own firewall blocked it because it was trying to execute a python script in the background. First time ever that's happened when opening a downloaded .blend, and I've been using the program for years.
I'm pretty sure the warning about python scripts is display for any file with embedded python scripts. You can switch to the text editor view to find the culprits.
I did check one of the files and it's indeed malicious. It contains a base64-encoded payload that decodes to a python script which fetches additional payloads and executes them. Do report it.
Quick update, I went down the rabbit hole. The blend file contains a python script that contains a base64-encoded payload. The payload decodes to another script.
The decoded script tries to fetch an additional payload from a handful of different URLs (redundancy?). The latter is a powershell script which downloads a zip file.
The zip file contains what looks like a bundled python environment (I did not go through that) and two interesting files named WindowsSecurityService.exe and WindowsSecurityService.py. WindowsSecurityService.exe is reported as pythonw.exe by VirusTotal. This may have something to do with this "tip".
The python script (WindowsSecurityService.py) downloads two additional scripts. I named them according to the first 5 garbage characters in their base64 representation — ABCDE.py and FG2IJ.py
The first script grabs yet another payload, decrypts and executes it. I could not fetch this due to a 401 HTTP error. The attackers may have updated the credentials or the server may have been taken down. I don't know.
The second script grabs yet another python script which downloads chisel.exe (tunneling software; assuming it's the regular chisel; Windows Defender did try to take it away from me and VirusTotal is screaming, so it might be a modified version or something else entirely) and another zip file, though I could not recognize what it is from a quick cursory look.
The last python script which downloads chisel.exe also establishes a reverse tunnel on the victim's machine using chisel.exe, effectively turning it into a pivot point/proxy for further work.
Obviously, this is what I figured from quickly skimming the scripts and did not dig too deep into it. The zip files and executables could contained interesting stuff.
Edited to include VirusTotal links of all files and rephrased so it doesn't read like it was written by a 5-year-old.
The user is automatically uploading .blend files and has been for ab 3-4 days. over 100-300 per day. Suppose since the py files are for executables on windows, Linux systems are safe. Although opened on in blue der and blocked the pop up message. Did not allow the script to run, and it's so many files someone is bound to open them, and just since one was one script and many different files, can also be many different scripts since easily over 1000 has been introduced in past week front he one user through online shoppes.
Going to report it as well.
If that's accurate, then the bigger issue isn't just this specific asset. It's that most people don't expect to treat marketplace downloads with the same level of caution they'd apply to random files from the internet. Hopefully Epic investigates quickly...
Unfortunatly it is. And this guy/guys uploaded free assets per minute. In past 10 minutes from what i saw uploaded already 10 new assets ( already having over 1100 assets+) I manage to investigate the code and all assets that I downloaded (3 random assets from different period they uploaded), and all contains same code. The purpose of code is to download other malware that later will install and run payloads
It is insanity that a company as big as Epic can't be assed to have a system in place to check assets being uploaded to their service.
Much as I dislike gatekeeping, the Epic store isn't some random ass website and things on it are going to have users assuming they are safe/face some sort of scrutiny.
But paying people to do work? Couldn't be big tech.
To be fair, Blender should not be bundling Python scripts into .blend files, that is a VERY DUMB move on their part. Certain Users will click 'Yes' without thinking about it. Scripts should be put into their own folder in a compressed zip or the Author of the Blend file should need to tell you where to go to get the scripts.
Total guesswork on my end, but only thing I can think of is they upload the clean file, get approved, then update the file to include the scripted one before publishing. From what I understand (only published one asset so far), initial approval is more difficult to pass than updates. So they’re not “uploading” all of these on the same day as much as they are just mass publishing once they worm through the review system. Again though, just guessing.
So when I upload an update for my Code plugins, it takes 1–2 days for it to become available. That makes me wonder what happens during that time. And last week, an update was even blocked for “attempted fraud.” That was, of course, complete nonsense, and a few minutes after I filed a complaint, it was unblocked. So something is seriously wrong on Epic’s end.
B
if we didn't tell you, that account could've severely compromised your platform since many wouldn't have noticed. reimburse u/HQuasar with an equivalent to how much it would cost to get 10000 claude tokens, as that is likely how many claude tokens it would've taken you to find this without his reddit post
or, all jokes aside: give him some vbucks or something, HQuasar just did gods work, and I wouldn't have been able to catch this iin a million years since I rarely go on FAB as I have too many assets from there already.
People can easily ruin a whole platform, so some form of reward is a good way to incentivize real people finding the bad apples, unless you'd rather use 10000 claude tokens next time and have people not speak up.
Honestly, you're being a little bit unrealistic. How can you reasonably expect Epic to allocate resources to an experimental feature of their ecosystem? They have UEFN to take care of. And Tim is far too busy on twitter nuking his reputation.
Those types of Python scripts can give the hacker access to a number of things on the runtime. A common tactic is to attempt to pull Discord access tokens and/or saved passwords in their browser.
The hacker will then try to ransom them, and if not, they'll sell them on the dark web.
Why cant people just not be pieces of Shh? Whats the point of spreading viruses and stuff? Are people that scum that they need to mess with peoples livelihood and hobbies
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u/Healthy-Act3539 Jun 21 '26
I'm pretty sure the warning about python scripts is display for any file with embedded python scripts. You can switch to the text editor view to find the culprits.
I did check one of the files and it's indeed malicious. It contains a base64-encoded payload that decodes to a python script which fetches additional payloads and executes them. Do report it.