|
|
The online gaming industry has matured into a serious business with revenues running into the billions of dollars. As we know, once something gains popularity on the Internet and is profitable, it becomes an attractive target for hackers.
In the early days, game crackers spent quality time breaking cd protection or gaining secret codes to unlock hidden weapons and levels. With the advent of both Online Games and Massively-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), official gaming networks now require legitimate cd keys and/or registered accounts to logon and play online. Virus authors responded by unleashing a rash of trojan horse programs masquerading as game cheats or trainers in order to steal cd keys of Online Games. To get a victim to run these trojans, these files were posted on bulletin board systems, internet relay chat channels or on popular gaming site forums. But the intended victim still had to download and execute the trojan for the ploy to work.
So the obvious question was “How to make a self spreading game cd key stealer?” Sdbots and Gaobot with multiplying capabilities via exploits and weak passwords were readily available at that time. It wasn’t long before a module was written and introduced in the bot code to steal game cd keys of popular online games from Electronic Arts, id Software, Red Storm and Valve. Fortuneately most of the bots in the wild these days have dropped this functionality as the popularity of some online games has waned recently.
Massively-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games like Lineage, World of Warcraft and the Final Fantasy series rule the gaming world today with an insane number of hardcore
gamers competing against each other in the virtual world. Everyday, McAfee Avert Labs receive numerous malware samples designed to steal game account information targeting popular game titles. And in a shift away from trojan horse programs masquerading as game cheats, we are seeing a trend where virus authors are writing old school viruses like W32/Bacalid, W32/Detnat and W32/Philis that target popular role playing games.
Are these guys doing it for the love of the game? Nope.. sounds too good to be true. Underground RMT (Real-Money trading) groups thrive in dealing with stolen game accounts and operate mostly out of Asia. And with a player’s stolen account information, their virtual assets can be transferred to another players account or simply auctioned off and sold for real money. This phenomenon is currently region specific but could easily reach menacing proportions similar to the threats plaguing online internet banking.
|
|
Tags: labs, McAfee Labs, vinoo thomas
Submit your own comments / message for this post