If you have seen the Kaspersky report on the Steam Workshop being abused to distribute malware and if you are worried about if you were or if you are at risk, here are some facts to put this matter into perspective (and why you are almost certainly NOT affected):
The issue was limited to a set of wallpapers of the “Application” type, mainly targeting Chinese users.
Application type wallpapers are turned off by default in the search. The majority of people never come across them for this reason.
Even if you enabled application type wallpapers in the search in the past, there is an unskippable warning that provides a detailed explanation about the theoretical risk of application wallpapers. This warning shows up for every single application wallpaper. You cannot disable this message or ever accidentally run a new application wallpaper without your full knowledge. This warning also comes with a countdown timer, forcing you to read it every time, you cannot skip past it accidentally.
The affected Workshop items were not popular uploads, they had odd titles in Chinese, if you never actively went to seek them out, it is unlikely that you just came across them while browsing the Workshop. That is not to say you should consider wallpapers with Chinese names as suspicious, it mostly means that all things considered (hidden by default, unpopular, cryptic Chinese names, unskippable warning) made them very “unattractive” to absolute vast majority of people.
99%+ of users never use Application wallpapers. Scene and Video wallpapers are very safe and for web wallpapers we also take precautions to make them as safe as possible. We have unfortunately seen a lot of wrong information floating around where people mixed up Scene wallpapers and Application wallpapers. Almost all interactive and dynamic wallpapers on the app use the safe “Scene” type, not “Application”.
We have already recently tightened up security months ago which is why the items reported by Kaspersky were from December - we have new measures in place that prevent this abuse on a large scale today and we will do another sweep through the Workshop.
The affected uploads have of course been banned and Steam automatically deletes them from the hard disk. If you’re wondering if your wallpapers are affected, the answer is almost certainly “no” just by checking if your wallpapers are still online / on your disk.
Again, if you never enabled Application type wallpapers in the filters, then searched for application wallpapers with Chinese names and then ignored the big red warning, you are not affected by this.
