GTA 5 mods Angry Planes and NoClip found to contain malware

If you’ve downloaded and used the GTA 5 mods ‘Angry Planes’ or ‘NoClip,’ there’s a strong chance they have infected your PC with dodgy malware.

This very unfortunate issue came to light after a poster on GTAforums.com noticed some unusual activities on his machine. Further investigations uncovered an .exe called Fade.

“I tested it twice,” he writes. “I would remove the Fade.exe and all of the other files, load up GTA 5 with only Angry Planes installed, and the Fade.exe would appear with the registry hijacks and other files. Loading up GTA 5 without Angry Planes does not add any files, so I can only assume that this mod is the one causing it.”

Other players have confirmed the same with the mod NoClip.

The malicious program was not being picked up by virus checkers, but does come up as a threat in Malwarebytes.

Additional technical analysis about the malware can be read here. It operates as a keylogger, so it should be a matter of urgency to change any and all passwords if you’ve been using Angry Planes or NoClip (after you’re sure you’ve managed to remove fade.exe).

The original post in the thread contains step-by-step removal instructions to clear up your machine. In addition, I’d recommend this page which has a pretty great set of instructions for general ‘housekeeping’ removal of malware crap from PCs.