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.

Comments

A cold day in Hell..

[zyl0x]

World of Warcraft is considered a better target for theft than a credit card. What kind of nerds are running those crime syndicates these days? Maybe if Blizzard came down on more of these gold-selling, account-selling, and item-selling service providers, this kind of nonsense wouldn't even be an issue.

Re:A cold day in Hell..

[Aladrin]

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.

Re:A cold day in Hell..

[MyIS]

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.

Re:Awflly big brush you're tarring with...

[pslam]

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...

OMFG! What about my Slashdot Account?

[Culture]

I just hope no one ever figures out a way to do this with Slashdot accounts. If WoW accounts are more valuable than credit cards, then Slashdot accounts must be more valuable than, I guess, say Dilithium Crystals or Ewok slaves. I think I have finally going to have to upgrade to Windows98 from Windows95. It probably is mature enough at this point.