Hacked Roblox accounts are spreading Trump propaganda

It's once again a presidential election year in America - unfortunately - and although campaigns are getting underway in the US, some political slogans have appeared in a particularly unexpected place. Multiple Roblox users have reported their accounts have been hacked and are now being used to send pro-Trump messages to other players.

As reported by BBC News, hackers are changing the affected avatar's clothing and forcing them to don a hat called The Encierro, which resembles the Trump campaign's red "Make America Great Again" cap. Hackers are also switching the player's clothes to either an eagle t-shirt, or a red, white and blue getup. And, once the user has been completely transformed, they can send messages to others on a player's friend list, such as "ask your parents to vote for Trump this year!" and "MAGA2020".

Although it may seem somewhat harmless, there is a more serious side to this: Roblox is a huge gaming and game development platform, with 90 million users logging in monthly as of April last year. Many of these players are under 18, with a core demographic of kids aged 9 to 15 - making it a more serious problem when hackers are supposedly targeting kids with political messages.

It seems likely this hack was carried out by trolls or individual Trump supporters rather than the official Trump campaign, although whoever's doing it has putin some serious effort. The BBC estimates at least 1000 accounts have been affected, a number found by searching the number of hacked profiles indexed by Google. The methods used by hackers are still unknown, although some suspect it's a case of brute-forcing passwords. Still, it's a security problem that Roblox will need to investigate. If you're worried about the security of your account in the meantime, make sure to change your password to something secure, and enable two-factor authentication. And don't click on any suspicious links sent through the Roblox messaging system, even if it's from a friend.