Video gamers dedicate thousands of hours of training and spend their own money for the best systems as well as skins, upgrades, and items that show the world their persona. They need to know that their hard work and monetary purchases are protected.

AVAST is proud to announce our sponsorship of Team FNATIC in the 2014 eSports season. Their professional video gamers are tops in the world competing for millions in prize money while thousands of fans cheer them on. Read more about the sponsorship.

“We are extremely excited to be partnering with FNATIC,” said Ondrej Vlcek, Chief Operating Officer at AVAST. “This partnership goes beyond just sponsoring a team in the rapidly growing eSports field. FNATIC will be collaborating with us on future products too. We’re thrilled to have such a prominent and well-loved team as our first partner in this area.”

On Monday between 17:00 and 18:30 CET, several of the most popular professional gamers on Team FNATIC had their streaming games interrupted by a TeamView attack. Their PC was remotely controlled, and the player was logged out of their gaming client. A notepad file appeared with the words, “You’ve been hacked. Fnatic, this is game over,” and other messages.

Here’s a video of FNATIC player nOtail experiencing the attack (NSFW due to language):

The hacking caused quite a stir on Twitter, reddit, Twitch.tv, and YouTube. The conversation went from surprise to dismay and often to hacking, malware, and the threat it presents to eSport professionals.

After nOtail was hacked a thread on reddit's DotA2 looked like this

Viewer God among peasants commented on Dotabuff,

hopefully nothing srs will come out of this like stolen bitcoins, empty pay pal accs and so on

Back on reddit, heisenbergfan said,

To be honest I would freak out and turn off PC immediately.

lol.. initially, just pull the ethernet cable mate :D

FNATIC and AVAST would prefer that no hackers got into your system, that no PayPal accounts were emptied, and that no one freak out. Whether you're playing high stakes games, downloading new music, or using your online banking tools, staying secure is the top priority. We hope you'll give avast! Antivirus a try. We’ll make sure #EverythingisGD. :-)

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