Slashdot Mirror
Owning Virtual Worlds For Fun and Profit
Trailrunner7 writes "Threatpost has a guest column by security researcher Charlie Miller on the ways in which attackers can easily take advantage of vulnerabilities in virtual worlds and perhaps online games to get control of other players' characters and avatars and even cash out their real-world bank accounts. From the article: 'It turns out that Second Life uses QuickTime Player to process its multimedia. When I started looking into virtual world exploits, with the help of Dino Dai Zovi, there was a stack buffer overflow in QuickTime Player that had been discovered by Krystian Kloskowski but had not yet been patched. In Second Life it is possible to embed images and video onto objects. We embedded a vulnerable file onto a small pink cube and placed it onto a [tract] of land we owned. No matter where the cube was, if a victim walked onto the land and had multimedia enabled (recommended but not required), they would be exploited. The cube could be inside a building, hovering in the air, or even under the ground, and the result was the same.'"
A program that interacts with a virtual world in this manner is no different from a browser or other client. And clients have historically been a huge source of attack vectors. Now, what would be useful and unique - stealing the user's stuff by infecting the client or MITMing the connection at the client machine (between the client software and the network card.) The admins could easily pick up on this and trace the trail the simoleons/swords/whatever takes - but by then, they could already have been sold for real money to some poor guy who though he got a great deal. Especially in Second Life, where it seems like transactions like that can take place very rapidly.
Emotions! In your brain!
its second life, do you really expect anything positive from it? its the mos eisley spaceport of gaming.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Seriously, the media seems to have a massive hard on for Second Life because they think it is the way the Internet ought to go. In reality Second Life is a pretty sub standard MMO with very few players. Why the hell do the fluff stories about it make Slashdot front page news?
Goes double since it sounds like this problem is fairly unique to SL. If you start seeing this in WoW and Aeon and EVE and so on then that's a story. However this is just a case of a poor excuse for an MMO having poor security. This would be the same as posting "Hey, Cadence SBP 16.3 have a security vulnerability and you need to upgrade to 16.3.014!" Nobody gives a shit, at least not enough people for it to be worth front page Slashdot. I understand if there's a security issue in a major OS, or an app that is widely used but in SL? Who cares? Not enough people to make it /. worthy I'd think.