Things are going wrong with the Epic Games Store at the moment as users report being redirected to suspicious third-party websites, some of which may contain malware.
This was first reported on Reddit where a user stumbled upon links inside “Top Results from Other Stores” section Epic Store. As the store’s system tries to display alternate pages for games that are not officially registered on the Epic Store, these links fetch content externally
In one instance a user was redirected to a fake Dark Souls page that contained malware.
A Whois domain lookup showed that this spoofed domain is owned by a shady character who controls numerous other domains like 1kea and dockdockgo along with airbnbchina, and all of them seem to be phishing websites.
Another flagged link disguised as an installer for the Epic Games Launcher (EpicGamesLauncherInstaller.msi) was pointed out by a different user.
At the moment it seems Epic Games has taken action and removed all suspicious links from its store. Regardless, this is a serious security breach one that could have been avoided, and one that might end up coming back to the store. Epic’s reliance on outside sources for non-verified input is vulnerable to phishing and malware attacks.
