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."

Comments

Re:I must be new here

[Monkeedude1212]

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.

No, this is often the people who STOLE the creds, log in, and sell the E-loot for REAL money. If you've never played WoW, Eve, or Runescape for more than a Month, I wouldn't expect you to understand. But this is a problem that does occur regularly.

Damn it.

[LupidStupy]

Mom!!!! Symantec hacked my server again.

They should post the usernames...

[BobMcD]

They could, as a service to the online community, go ahead and post the usernames that are compromised.

Re:They should post the usernames...

[JWSmythe]

    I used to have a lot of fun with that, when I was the sysadmin for a large site. It seemed every script kiddie wanted the password to it. It showed up regularly on passwordz sites. We had a whole bunch of triggers to detect and resecure accounts. One of the easy and obvious ones was to let them post it, and catch it afterwards (usually within seconds of being posted). The legitimate account holder got a notification that we changed their password to a secure one. Everyone else just sat there and wondered how we'd catch them so fast.

    That trigger was pretty low on the list though. My favorite was to catch 'em scanning for passwords. If they tried say 1000 wrong passwords in a short period, but got one or two right, we'd let them keep scannning for a while, and then block their access to the server. (iptables drop rule). Then the program would figure out which passwords they actually got right, change those, and notify the account holder of their new password. :) It was always fun to see what the delay was between them finding a password, and when it started being used from passwordz sites. In those cases, we always had the account secured before they had time to post it. The typical time from being scanned to being posted was about 12 hours. The typical time for us to reissue the passwords was less than 5 minutes.

    I can't imagine online game places wouldn't have something similar. Brute force attacks are just too easy, and people will always try them. How many different usernames can a person really try before you know that they're just brute force attacking.

Re:I must be new here

[BobMcD]

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.

Re:And if I did this...

[BobMcD]

And the penalty if I did that is, what, 5 years in federal PMITA prison?

There is something wrong in this world.

You're quite wrong. This is an example of one of the few somethings that is right in this world. Selective enforcement is designed into the system, along with jury nullification, to help the laws achieve ends that keep the public they support happy. Any "completely fair" application of the law would make it unworkable in very short order.

Could you imagine a robot issuing you indecency citations every time you pass gas in public? Could you imagine a police officer doing the same if you passed gas into a megaphone-amplified-sound-system aimed at, say, an Inaugural speech? Context is key, and thankfully so.

Re:And if I did this...

[TubeSteak]

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?

Symantec and many other companies set up honeypot computers.
The honeypot gets infected, Symantec pulls apart the trojan and studies its web traffic.
This usually leads to the dumpsite where the trojan is uploading the data.

Many botnet/trojan masters don't bother to encrypt their data dumps or secure the server hosting it.
And even if they did, are they going to sue Symantec for unauthorized access?

Re:And if I did this...

[BForrester]

RTFA. This is not a case of Symantec hammering through random servers looking for bogeymen.

The very first sentence of the article states that the server was flagged from a new set of sample data submitted to Symantec. This is likely user data aggregated from Norton's threat detection network.

Re:And if I did this...

[idontgno]

We don't care about your sick perverted little secret fetishes.

Oh, "tyranny." Never mind.