By Jenny Rapson 
My 13-year-old daughter just got a phone in August, and we have it pretty well locked down so that she has to ask permission to install any app or game. (We also have a service that sends us an alert if anything concerning happens in her games, apps, searches, texts, or photos.) About two weeks ago she asked me if she could install the game Among Us, to play with a close friend of hers. Because I trust the friend’s mom, I said yes—on the condition that she play only private games with that friend and other girls she personally knows.
Hello everyone,
We’re are super duper aware of the current hacking issue and we’re looking into it. We will be pushing out an emergency server update so people who are in game will get kicked from games. Please play private games or with people that you trust!!! Bare with us!! 😰— InnerSloth (@InnerslothDevs) October 23, 2020
The basic concept of Among Us is that a group of players work together to prepare their spaceship for departure, all the while knowing that there is a saboteur and impostor in their group. Oh—and the imposter also wants to kill everyone! The crew mates can win by completing their tasks and voting the correct impostor off the ship.
Among Us is huuuugely popular with teens and young tweens, and is normally pretty harmless, but because we can’t have nice things, someone hacked it this week in a big way.
If your kid use Among Us, here’s what they might see or experience while the game’s creators are working to disable the hack.
- Spam messages in the group chat threatening to hack the player’s device if they don’t subscribe to the hacker’s YouTube or Discord channels
- Spam messages promoting “TRUMP 2020”
- A barrage of messages so constant that they can’t play the game
The game’s developer, InnerSloth, is working on multiple fixes for this hack, but until then, here’s what parents can do:
- Make sure your kids are only playing PRIVATE games with people they trust. Public games with random players are what are getting spammed.
- Keep your kids off Among Us for a couple days. The hacker, who goes by Eris Loris, is publicly making statements about how much he is enjoying his hack. He sounds like a TREAT, and also sounds like he might not be done causing trouble.
- Use a monitoring app like Bark, so that you will get a notification if your child receives any disturbing messages.
Alright, wave 2 of anti-hacks are going out:
Wave 1 did fix impersonation, this is why the prominent hack now is just chat spam and mass despawn (black room)
Wave 2 should fix both of these. We’ll see where we need to go from there.— Forest (@forte_bass) October 24, 2020
I don’t know about you, but it sickens me that a hacker would target a game like Among Us that has a super-high number of child users.
This serves as a good reminder that the internet is never truly a safe place and we need to be constantly vigilant to keep our kids safe!
Do your kids play Among Us? What precautions do you take to make sure they are safe on their devices? Share your best tips, and let’s work together to keep them safe!
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