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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."
You'd find something else to do, just like anyone with a normal psyche. This stuff does hold the potential for addiction, which for most of these people is the only explanation for their obsessive behavior.
You have no idea. MMO's are new, and new things tend to get noticed, but hobbies that waste zillions of hours and dollars are anything but new. Look at the cost and time involved in, say, rebuilding an old car. Finding all the parts, tearing down, cleaning, rebuilding, tuning, paint and polish. All for what, a car worth at most $10k? For what cost of labor and materials?
Look also at the cost of raising a family. Much, much, much more expensive to have spawns running around than it would be just to rent a lot of porno.
Think about it: nobody really wants his life to be sitting in a chair wasting time and just waiting for death to come a little closer. Nonetheless, this is the behavior of folks with addictions.
Actually, that description sounds like having a (white collar) job. I produce nothing of value, but here I am, helping my employer to shuffle piles of dollars into his pocket while I get enough to pay the rent. Nobody else gets a useful product or service out of it. I do it most days, but it feels like in a sane world I would be doing something that actually has tangible benefit or is personally enriching.
The key difference, for me anyway, in what you're describing and the virtual world is choice. I get to decide who I work with in that world - not so much in this one. I can say and do as I please. I can unplug whenever I want. I can even fire up a completely different game at a moment's notice, and come back to this one without any hard feelings. Even within the one game I can level a new character, explore a new facet of the game itself, or invent things to do out of thin air. I never need to buy special equipment, never need to replace anything, and can have an amazing variety of activities involving literally fifty different people (at a minimum), all from that same comfortable spot on the couch.