Among Us, the viral hit PC and mobile murder mystery game, has come under attack from a particularly vicious spambot. Starting on Thursday evening, hundreds of players in public matches found their in-game chats had been hijacked to broadcast new messages, primarily pro-Donald Trump slogans and demands that users subscribe to a YouTube channel called “Eris Loris.”

InnerSloth, the three-person Redmond, Wash.-based indie studio behind Among Us, is currently working to fight the hack. This included an emergency server update on Thursday night, and efforts are continuing at time of writing. For the time being, InnerSloth officially recommends that Among Us players stick to private sessions or matches with friends.

The pro-Trump spam attack comes two days after Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s record-breaking Among Us stream, where she played the game live on Twitch for three hours to encourage younger Americans to vote in this year’s election.

Eurogamer’s Emma Kent was able to speak with the purported author of the Eris Loris hack via Discord, who claims to be a college student and Donald Trump supporter. The attack was carried out via a quickly-written spambot and a network of donated servers. It was reportedly meant as a publicity stunt for “Loris,” who makes and sells cheats for various video games, as well as advertising for Trump’s reelection bid. Loris told Kent that the spambot has affected over 1.5 million individual games of Among Us.

Among Us is a game of “social deduction” for up to 10 players, pitting one team of color-coded Crewmates against the one to three randomly-chosen players who are actually alien Impostors, who are out to kill off everyone else. The result is a tense round of paranoia and manipulation, similar to party games like Mafia and Werewolf, where Impostors work to take out other players one at a time without being identified and exposed.

InnerSloth released Among Us two years ago, but it wasn’t until last July, when the video game streamer community on Twitch took an interest in it, that Among Us abruptly went viral. It’s currently one of the most popular games on both Steam and Twitch, with hundreds of thousands of players and viewers at time of writing.

Among politically-minded Among Us fans, before and since AOC’s Tuesday night stream, “orange is sus” has become a running anti-Trump joke, often shown alongside a depiction of an orange-suited Crewmate from the game with Trump’s trademark hairstyle. “Sus,” an abbreviation for “suspicious,” is frequently used in Among Us’s chat to describe a player who might be an Impostor.

This is only the latest chapter in Among Us‘s issues with hacking. Players have reported cheats that include guaranteeing a spot as an Impostor, the ability to walk through walls, and being able to change other players’ names, type in their text fields, or kill every player in the match instantly. InnerSloth’s Forest Willard, in an interview with Kotaku, has said that he’s working to put an account system in place for Among Us, in order to create better ways to moderate chats and report bad behavior to the devs.

These are the sorts of issues that any multiplayer game tends to have to deal with sooner or later, and Among Us‘s are compounded by its small development team and sudden rise out of obscurity. For now, the smartest play may be to, as InnerSloth suggests, stick to making private matches.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.