Borderlands 2 "fans" force save-deleting Graveyard virus on fellow Xbox 360 owners

Not been back to Pandora for a while? You may want to hold off a while longer. Borderlands 2 on Xbox 360 has fallen victim to a rather nasty virus known as "Graveyard.sav", which wipes your entire save file when you die.

The virus was allegedly created by a number of community-spirited, self-styled "hardcore" Borderlands 2 fans, who think the game's existing difficulty settings are too soft. Gearbox has already submitted a fix to Microsoft, but there's no word on when exactly it'll be available, so please heed the preventative measures detailed by official forum moderator Sacridfire:

1. Do not mod any items.

2. Do not trade/dupe any items that have been modded or duped before as this is how the virus spreads.

3. If you do get affected by this virus and catch it before you die, an experienced modder may be able to fix it for you. *WARNING* You are potentially opening yourself up to more viruses/spyware by allowing somebody to mess with a file on your computer. I do not recommend doing this under any circumstance.

"Recently a few users have begun violating the Xbox Live Code of Conduct by using an external application to maliciously disrupt the experience and sabotage characters of legitimate Borderlands 2 players on Xbox 360," Gearbox blogged on Friday. "Fortunately it's easy to avoid this scenario.

"After extensive internal testing, an update to prevent this disruption has been submitted to Microsoft and will be released as soon as possible. Until then, concerned Xbox 360 players of Borderlands 2 should consider playing online with trusted individuals in non-public sessions. This does not affect players on PC or PlayStation 3.

"We also advise that before ceasing play, users always select "Save and Quit" from within the pause menu while their character is alive. If after the death of their character players find themselves at the main menu of Borderlands 2 instead of respawning in-game, be sure to immediately select "Continue" to resume playing as that character.

"We ask that players report any suspicious behaviour in Borderlands 2 to spotted@gearboxsoftware.com and provide as much details and documentation of their disrupted experience as possible to assist us in our investigation."

If you're among those responsible, by all means let us know where you live so we can (e.g.) abduct house pets and destroy all your computer hardware with sledgehammers. Functional consoles are for noobs, bruv. When you're able to squeeze the juice of entertainment from a small heap of contorted, shattered plastic - then, my son, you'll be a Man.

UPDATE: OXM reader msbhvn offers the following advice to people affected. "What happens is when you die and the "Fight for your life" meter runs out, instead of respawning all you can do is move the camera around. If you quit to dashboard or switch characters your save file is replaced with a file called "Graveyard.sav" which just has a few statistics about your level and how you died.

"What you should do instead is select Save and Quit from the pause menu, it'll tell you it can't save, but select to quit without saving anyway. At the main menu, select Continue and then when the game's loaded up, select Save and Quit to save a complete, but still infected, save file from the console's memory. Your save file should be fixed when you run the game after the patch is released. It isn't advisable to play the game with the infected character (and especially not over Live) until the fix is out."