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Symantec Finds Server Containing 44 Million Stolen Gaming Credentials
A Symantec blog post reports that the company recently stumbled upon a server hosting the stolen credentials for 44 million game accounts. It goes on to explain how the owners of the server made use of a botnet to process that mountain of data:
"Now it's time to turn those gaming credentials into hard cash. But how do you find out which credentials are valid and thus worth some money? Three options come to mind: 1) Log on to gaming websites 44 million times! 2) Write a program to log in to the websites and check for you (this would take months). 3) Write a program that checks the login details and then distribute the program to multiple computers. Option one naturally seems next to impossible. Option two is also not very feasible, since websites typically block IP addresses after multiple failed login attempts. By taking advantage of the distributed processing that the third option offers, you can complete the task more quickly and help mitigate the multiple-login failure problems by spreading the task over more IP addresses. This is what Trojan.Loginck's creators have done."
Mom!!!! Symantec hacked my server again.
It was probably one (some) of their client's servers that got hacked and used in the collection of the credentials. The client found out that they got hacked and demanded that Symantec explain what happen. Symantec investigated and found out.
They're not going to say "a server we were protecting with our products got hacked and was used in an operation to steal 44 million credentials..."
We don't care about your sick perverted little secret fetishes.
Oh, "tyranny." Never mind.
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