Slashdot Mirror
WoW Players Targeted By Windows Flaw Exploit
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.
That would render the wow economy useless... You would only be able to buy from npc's and not from other players.
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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?
It probably is a better target, or at least safer. There's nothing illegal (AFAIK) about selling accounts and gold, and I imagine it'd be tough to prove who actually stole the account. The worst thing most people who engage in this behavior have to look forward to is an account suspension, whether you're buying or selling.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
What hole have you been hiding in? Anything that happens on Blizzard's servers is THEIR property. They can do whatever they like with it. By 'come down on' he means 'ban accounts'. If these 'gold-selling, account-selling, and item-selling service providers' lose more money than they make, they'll have to give up. It takes time and effort to amass stuff to sell, and there are companies -paying- people to amass it. If they have no way to do their thing, they'll have to stop.
Having said that, short of shutting down all the servers, there's no way to stop it. Even having to start from scratch constantly, they'll still make enough money to keep going and hopefully outlast Blizzard's fury. Blizzard can't afford to hire enough people to police this well enough to stop it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Equipment, yes.
Gold, no.
Trade skill items, no.
I dont RTFA but im assuming u have to go to one of those "power lvl" sites for this to happen (or any other site). That means that people that buy gold and items (ilegal according to blizz) with real cash have big chances of getting hacked. If all this is true why should blizzard care? this is theire anti-power lvl system. RandomGM : WORKING AS INTENDED.
Ah, history is full of examples how making something illegal completely eliminates it. *rolls eyes* More laws make more criminals, and if Blizzard came down on this, they would only drive this arms-race to higher levels. *OR* they could cash in on this (first and foremost), and also improve the game so that IT ISN'T A FRICKEN SECOND JOB!
See, this is why I quit WoW - the fact that 90% of the time one has to "farm" or wait for a raid to assemble, or dully point their running character along some path across the map. I paid them money to escape the daily grind, and look what happened - I got into an even more boring grind. And, of course, there is no way to escape that grind either, because that's the only way to even get to the "fun" 10% of the game.
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.
http://zero-to-enterprise.blogspot.com/
And I hope you have ID to match that. Again, in many states, ID is required.
Business Watch International (see BWIPOLICE.COM, for example) maintain database servers for pawn transactions and many municipalities are changing their laws to require pawn shops report their transactions electronically. (Here in the Eugene, Oregon area, for example, that is now the law. Not paper pawn slips for the police to wade through, but databases they have live access to.)
Of course, it could even be argued that these sorts of laws protect pawn shops from being charged with "Receiving Stolen Goods" as well as the loss associated with paying for an item that is taken by police after it is determined to be stolen.
The reason, though, this doesn't apply online is because the law regarding virtual goods is nebulous. Does The Sword of Death have a value? If no, then what is the crime? If yes, then why is getting it as a drop not considered taxable income?
It would be nice if there was some equivalent to the "rested XP" bonus once you've reached max level; some benefit that casual gamers would receive for not being online all the time. I'm sure the hard-core people would whine about it, but I doubt many of them would quit over it (as long as it wasn't some outrageous benefit).
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
By you're logic, it's legal for me to sell someone the Brooklyn bridge. After all, New York still owns it after I'm done, so where's the crime?
If you're truly looking for something closer to reality, then perhaps you should check out LARPing
-- jchenx