Epic Games, the developer behind the incredibly popular game, Fortnite, has publically slammed Google for revealing a security flaw in its Android release which would have given hackers an easy way to gain access to players’ phones. It would allow “an app on the device to hijack the Fortnite Installer to instead install a fake [app] with any permissions that would normally require user disclosure,” the issue report reads.
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After discovering the vulnerability on August 16, Google notified Epic privately, working “around the clock” to deliver a fix the next day on August 17. Despite pleading with the tech giant not to make the discovery public to protect those who hadn’t yet applied the fix, Google went ahead and publicised the flaw anyway, citing “Google’s standard disclosure practices”.
“It was irresponsible of Google to publicly disclose the technical details of the flaw so quickly while many installations had not yet been updated and were still vulnerable,” Epic Games chief executive, Tim Sweeney, said in a statement.
“A company as powerful as Google should practice more responsible disclosure timing than this and not endanger users in the course of its counter-PR efforts against Epic’s distribution of Fortnite outside of Google Play.”
That’s right, Epic released Fortnite outside of Google Play, which stopped Google netting a 30 per cent chunk of the game’s microtransaction income, which is a decent amount of money, even for a company as big as the tech giant. To give you an idea, Apple has already copped $73 million via the game since March.
Fortnite is currently available on almost every platform you can think of on a free-to-play basis, so if you’ve ever been curious to check it out, you can do so pretty much anywhere for absolutely nothing.
