Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

WoW Players Targeted By Windows Flaw Exploit

Posted by Zonk on from the keep-your-cursors-peeled dept.

grimwell writes "The BBC is carrying the story that the ANI flaw is being used to target World of Warcraft players, as hackers search for account details. 'Analysis of that malicious software showed that it lay dormant on a victims machine until they ran World of Warcraft (WoW) at which point it captured login data and sent it to the hacking group ... Research by security firm Symantec suggests that the raw value of a WoW account is now higher than a credit card and its associated verification data.'" Doubtless, any compromised accounts would quickly see their equipment sold, and the resulting gold transferred to another account. This gold would then be sold for US currency to Real Money Traders like the company IGE.

4 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A cold day in Hell.. by Planesdragon · · Score: 2, Informative

    And even if they could, on what grounds could you charge any of those places with a crime?

    Fraud and unlawful computer access, to start. Racketeering too, and possibly money laundering or false advertising.

  2. Re:Awflly big brush you're tarring with... by pslam · · Score: 5, Informative
    While I'm no fan of gold farmers and in-game currency traders, is there any evidence to justify naming IGE in that addendum? What justifies that?

    Why, you could click on their web page and note the tagline "IGE, Buy WOW Gold, World of Warcraft Gold, FFXI Gil, Final Fantasy XI Gil, Lineage 2 Adena". These guys are assholes and proud of it. They don't deserve apologists.

    Maybe I should also dig up the evidence that in the past they were involved in authoring trojans...

  3. Re:A cold day in Hell.. by MBGMorden · · Score: 3, Informative

    If Blizzard made the game actually *fun* to play almost all the time, then noone would see the incentive to pay someone else to get through the boring stuff! And voila, no gold-farmers, no hacking accounts, no Slashdot story. Yep, and they'd lose a lot of paying customers shortly afterwards. Here's the rub with games like WoW: they're largely a pissing contest where people like to gloat about how much better stats they have, how much better their gear is, how high their tradeskills are, etc. (and this is coming from someone who actually does play the game quite regularly).

    If they took out the grind, the coveted "status" that so many either love to maintain, or love to strive for, vanishes. Everybody is left with just the game for the game's sake, which while arguably the way it "should be" won't work for WoW because the game engine itself isn't the most interesting thing in the world.

    That's mainly why all the gear in TBC was so overpowered compared to the original campaign. People were finally getting to the point where many realized they were NEVER gonna make it into BWL, much less Naxx, and starting to lose interest. They gave them some major gear upgrades so that they can feel like "wow, I'm a badass - this stuff blows away the gear I saw those raiding guys walking around with a few weeks ago". Then they get back on the treadmill to try and reach that status again. Stupid, but if you take away the treadmill a lot of them will see no point.
    --
    "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  4. Re:Soulbind Gold? by pslam · · Score: 2, Informative
    There are ways around this. A common trick used to exchange gold cross-faction (not involving gold sellers at all) is to stick a "plain letter" (a very cheap item) on the cross-faction auction house for the amount of gold you want. The player on the other faction then buys it.

    Same applies to same-faction trading. In order to really stop gold changing hands, you would need to remove the auction houses. It would also render a lot of the profession system useless because you couldn't do enchants/crafting and get a fee.

    Have you played WoW?