Garry’s Mod servers hit with virus infection. It can be removed but beware when connecting.

This evening players of Garry’s mod were greeted with inexplicable coughing messages and it’s since transpired there is server and client infecting virus.

For the past couple of hours an on-going thread highlighting the problem has been active on the Facepunch forums as players attempted to figure out exactly what was going on.

It has transpired that by connecting to an infected server, the client also becomes infected and a batch file has been written that should sort the problem out for both client and servers. However, it sounds like if you reconnect to an infected server the cycle continues. Infected servers are showing up with a prefix of “!!!” so those should be avoided

Server admins should give this piece of code a run as posted by destroyer6171 who says it helped clean up his server. There’s some confusion as to what the infection actually does but from all accounts it is simply spamming servers with *cough* and is not stealing passwords or anything as disastrous as that despite some reports from players saying their Steam Wallets have been cleared out.

To be on the safe side,  give the game a miss for a day or so if you’ve avoided infection. There will likely be more information from the Garry’s Mod team shortly but palyers can be reinfected from a server even if it’s been removed. Damn annoying.

Update: A patch has been deployed to stop this. Garry responds.