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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."
4) Sell them in bulk, untested.
Is the buyer really going to come back and demand a refund when it doesn't work?
Probably not, but reputation must be worth something in criminal enterprises. Giving out a bunch of bogus products kills the word-of-mouth.
And what real benefit are these, anyway? Well, all the criminal has to do is sell off the account for less than the game costs up-front. They make pure profit and people willing to buy stolen games get a discount. Steam accounts could probably be quite lucrative, for instance.
OK, so Symantec "recently stumbled upon a server hosting...".
What, was it placed on their doorstep one night, and they didn't notice it when they went outside to get the morning paper?
So, they wrote a crawler that intrusively scanned servers that they didn't have permission to access, opening and analyzing files that they didn't have permission to read, then published what they found?
And the penalty if I did that is, what, 5 years in federal PMITA prison?
There is something wrong in this world.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Oh for the love of humanity the things people will do in the name of wasting time.
One man's wasted time is another man's Sistine Chapel, or pornography collection, or fictitious language for a fantasy book series.
From the moment you open your eyes in the morning until you close them at night you're passing time. Whether or not it is wasted depends entirely on whether or not you regret how you spent it.
I can't imagine how they could sell those individually to gamers. For them it makes more sense to single out invalid accounts and to sell large blocks to less skilled criminals at a premium. Just like in the normal business world one would pay more than twice for a product which has a 0% failure rate instead of 50%. Of course one could just pretend that all accounts are valid, but word of mouth would be your least least problem in that scenario ;)
I don't read replies by ACs.
Hopefully they'll try to return all these stolen credentials back to the owners. Returning stolen property can get pretty costly though, with so many different owners. They can't just go destroying them, then the owners would lose them.
What would be the point of publishing a 500 MB (@~11 chars/user) text file? And how would they do that? If anyone gives a shit about their account, they'll just change their password as soon as they hear about this.
Also, let's do some statistics, shall we? Let's say there are 20 million WoW accounts (pulled the number out of my ass, Wikipedia said 12 million in 2008). There are also 0.2 million stolen WoW accounts. The chance of your account being compromised is 100:1. Pretty high, if you ask me, so just scan your computer online with an antivirus if you don't have one installed, change your password and stop asking for stupid stuff in the name of the community (what community?!?).
Yes, it's sarcasm. Deal with it!
But it ended up that he eventually figured out that a server admin had poisoned a Web-downloadable .exe map pack file with a trojan that scraped some account info off files while running a keylogger to get anything that the scraper missed. These hackers are usually on top of their game
That's one step above coldcalling your friend and asking for his credentials. These aren't "hackers" "on top of their game"...your bud is just a complete moron.