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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.
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
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...