More than 50,000 Minecraft players have been affected by a new malware this week. The malware, which was first reported by anti-virus company Avast, is said to have infected thousands of skin files on the official game servers.

Avast stated in a blog post that the malware is "designed to reformat hard-drives and delete backup data and system programs." Affected users have reported having files deleted on their computer, making this a serious case of ownage.

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Below is how some of the code looks:

The infected skins are embedded with a malicious Powershell script that is capable of destroying data on the local hard drive in addition to printing messages such as "You have maxed your internet usage for a lifetime", and "You are nailed, buy a new computer this is a piece of s***".

Minecraft is one of the most popular games in the world right now with tens of millions of monthly players.