The downloadable video game has been around for at least the month of October. Written by Zach Gage, it associates each 'alien' created with a random file on the player's computer. When the alien is killed, the file is deleted.
On the website offering the download, Gage calls it "a video game with real-life consequences", and justifies it as a social experiment. "Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon and rewarded for using it, that doing so is right?" he asks.
Anti-virus companies are treating it as malicious. "While interesting in its own right, there's nothing stopping someone with more malicious intentions from modifying it slightly and then passing it on to unsuspecting users, causing significant damage to a computer", said Symantec employee Ben Hahorney in a blog post. "As a result, we’re detecting this threat as OSX.Loosemaque."
"For us, the choice was simple - the program was malicious (even if it did announce its intention), and it wasn't the kind of thing that our customers will want on their networks", said Graham Cluley, senior security consultant at Sophos. "So, as soon as the guys in our labs stop trying to get on the high score chart, Sophos wrote detection for it as OSX/LoseGame-A at the end of last month."
Trend Micro, citing similar concerns, classified it as OSX_LOSEGAM.A.
The game was created using openFrameworks, an open-source C++ toolkit. As this article was published, 'avernus' had slaughtered 4912 aliens (and presumably most of his home directory), to attain the high score, according to Gage's site.