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For 20 Years, This Man Has Survived Entirely By Hacking Online Games (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A hacker says he turned finding and exploiting flaws in popular MMO video games into a lucrative, full-time job. Manfred's character is standing still in the virtual world of the 2014 sci-fi online multiplayer game WildStar Online. Manfred, the real life person behind the character, is typing commands into a debugger. In a few seconds of what seems to be an extremely easy hack, Manfred's virtual currency skyrockets up to more than 18,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 18 quintillion. I'm watching this hack in a demo video recorded by Manfred as I stand next to him in a Las Vegas bar on Thursday. Manfred, who asked me not to reveal his real name, says he has been hacking several video games for 20 years, making a real-life living by using hacks like the one I just witnessed. His modus operandi has changed slightly from game to game, but, in essence, it consisted of tricking games into giving him items or currency he doesn't have a right to have. He would then sell those items and currency to other players (for real money) or wholesales them to online gray markets, such as the Internet Game Exchange, that then would sell those goods to individual players. At the current exchange rate, Manfred estimates he has $397 trillion worth of WildStar gold. This is obviously an outlandish number, but, essentially, his income was only limited by the real-life market for the in-game currency. When I spoke to Manfred ahead of his talk at the Def Con hacking conference, he said he wanted to go in, give his demo, and go out "as a ghost," never to be seen or heard from again. He said he wanted to be "invisible," just like he's been for the past two decades. He said he's found more than 100 publicly unknown vulnerabilities in more than 20 online video games, making hacking and trading virtual goods into his full time job.
...For everything wrong with MMO's these days. This guy is it. Good job, you and your kind have ruined most MMO's for everyone to make a buck.
The really sad part is they are destroying the very thing they're making money off.
No one likes to play an MMO that obviously been hacked numerous times and that game's internal economy has been completely wrecked by this behavior.
Almost certainly wrong. Humans don't work like that. Typically when someone decides to reveal their E-Z money secrets it's because it's dried up and now there's more to be gained from talking than the actual doing. Or it's total bullshit and never did work. A well known "motivational" speaker or two come to mind.
So there are loads of people who seem to find his exploits bad or wrong. But I think - great, go for it. Those MMOs are either overtly or covertly encouraging many people to spend huge amounts of time (and often, hard cash) for a meager award. The games companies are not much more than modern parasites - and 'Manfred' is merely a parasite's parasite.
Who, actually, gets harmed. The gamers want the cash - he can supply it at market rates - and the publishers are already horrendously bloated and fattened on the continual streams of micropayments.
Maybe because his name is a reference to the Prantagonist of Accelerando, but I, for one, am in favour of Manfred's profession.
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You have missed my point.
Game developers do spend time and effort to make the game secure. However, security is a trade off - you want to have end to end encryption of the messages and in-memory encryption of all variables? That's going to cost you lots of extra CPU cycles and reduce your framerate.
No software is hack proof - this has been demonstrated time and time again.
This arsehole has boasted that he has spent 20 years doing nothing but hacking and ripping off other game players. If there are no repecussions for that, it's going to only encourage a lot more doing the same.
This is not a victimless crime. It denies honest game players enjoyment of the game, it increases development costs substantially to have to devote resources to patching hackable flaws, and it most importantly deprives the game company of customers when they get dissapointed in the game and leave.
I have no problem with someone hacking a single player game and giving themselves a bazillion HP and max gold - it's only affecting their own game play. What I have a problem with is when they go on to ruin the game for other players, without penalty to them whatsoever.
A car analogy: You lock your car and take reasonable precautions to secure it. If someone throws a brick through the window and steals it, you don't say "oh well - should have installed brick proof windows" - you expect that there are laws that will deter this behavior and prosecute the perps when they are caught.
If someone boasted they have been tossing bricks through car windows for 20 years and living off the stolen cars, you'd expect some action to be taken against them.