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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."
I an a little naive to the criminal enterprise that is stolen gaming credentials, but I have to wonder: why does it matter, if you are selling a stolen credential, if it's good or not? Is the buyer really going to come back and demand a refund when it doesn't work? And what real benefit are these, anyway? Don't tell me that people buy stolen creds and log into them just to take all their e-loot (worth thousands of e-dollars)? Oh for the love of humanity the things people will do in the name of wasting time.
Mom!!!! Symantec hacked my server again.
They could, as a service to the online community, go ahead and post the usernames that are compromised.
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.
hunter2
One of my co-workers was giving a presentation once (he is a self proclaimed computer expert in every facet), and he asked us "how do I make this power point presentation full screen?". We replied Alt-F4. He did it and said "hmm that is weird", and restarted power point and pressed Alt-F4 again... after attempting it 5 times he gave up and said "Oh well I guess we will just do the presentation like this".
"The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." -Harlan Ellison
Summary (and article) claims "44 million stolen gaming credentials", which sounds like a lot of us English-speaking and English-game-playing Slashdot readers.
However, in the article, they analyze "a particular sample", with about ~18.3 million accounts in it. Of those ~18.3 million, ~16 million of them were game accounts for "Wayi Entertainment", which is an Asian company. They have no English website, that I can tell, and I think it's a safe assumption there are no English counterpart to these games.
So we're mainly talking about accounts for crazy Asian freemium sprite-based "MMO's". There were only ~210,000 World of Warcraft accounts, most of which, I assume, are also for the Chinese version of the game.
So if you're reading this, I'm going to go out on a limb and say your account is probably safe.
My WoW account was inactive for a year and a half.
It was also hacked, months after I canceled my subscription. No idea how.
So, in short, they sit on the account info and wait until it is inactive. This way they are less likely to be noticed as they link the WoW account to a battle.net account that they control. They also PAY to have the stolen account reactivated and thus raise no flags with Blizzard. It looks like someone simply reactivated the account as far as Blizzard is concerned.
Once they have the account, and they are pretty sure nobody will be using it anytime soon (except them), they turn your best toon into a miner/herbalist and set it up to bot its way to mountains of ore/herbs. All the resources were simply mailed to another of my toons and auctioned or passed onto yet another toon on another account.
I choose to reactivate my account while the guy was full-steam-ahead. He had dropped my enchanting on my hunter (already had 375 herbs), paid for the WotLK expansion so he could get both herbalism and mining skills to 450. He didn't touch any of my other toons, except for a level 2 in Stormwind.
After Blizzard was done restoring my account they left the hunter with 450 Herbalism, reset the enchanting and replaced his items. He also had about 3k in gold more then he did when I canceled.
They joy was on the level 2. STACKS and STACKS of ore that the hacker mailed to another toon came back in the mail. This worked out great as I wanted to roll a new toon with engineering. All told, I logged back in about 6k richer, more then enough to get back into the swing of things.
At least that is what happened to my account.
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.