MMORPG-Gold-Farming and Password-Stealers

“The Price For Gold On The EURO Realm Dropped again“

No, it’s not the same gold that we have known for thousands of years; it’s virtual gold which MMORPG gamers compete to obtain in order to increase their wealth and power. Surprisingly, some people (aka “gold farmers”) have managed to find a way to convert this virtual gold into real money. It’s estimated that more than 100,000 young people make living in China only through “gold farming”.

Given all this information, no wonder why we have been getting all these password-stealers which are specialized in looking for passwords of MMORPG gamers. This trend started at least three years ago with Trojans like PWS-LegMir, then others followed it such as PWS-Lineage and PWS-WoW. The worrying thing is the number of variants that we come across everyday and the variety of techniques malware writers have been using; starting from keyloggers, rootkits, to network sniffers, and the most recent file-infector, W32/HLLP.Philis.

People within the MMORPG communities have issued several calls to the providers of these games to try and make it harder to do “gold farming”. Genuine players don’t want to see other people staying around and ruining their games. On the other hand, us, here in Avert Labs issue a similar call to the same vendors to try and make it useless for malware writers to write password-stealers for these games. These Trojans and viruses are written for profit, so let’s try to stop the reason they were written for.