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Online gamers on cyber criminal's hit list
By siliconindia
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Friday, 18 September 2009, 00:32 IST |
1 Comments
Bangalore: Gaming market around the world has been hit hard by recession. But online gaming has continued to grow and is attracting thousands of users. The popularity of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games is not only attracting gaming enthusiast but also spammers and phishers.
Cyber criminals are using phishing and trojans to steal players' login names and passwords. "Usually this is about trying to get to other accounts using the same password, holding someone's gaming account hostage for ransom or transferring items purchased in one account to another account," adds Shantanu Ghosh, Vice President, India Product Operations, Symantec to Business Standard. Ghosh also says that there have been cases of spam popping up inside of games through characters created by spammers, who then spam other users in the games that they have infiltrated. In 2008, Symantec observed web attacks from 808,000 unique domains, many of which are mainstream websites, including: News, online retail, games and many others.
Spammers target gamers in MMO games by creating characters that send unsolicited ads for items such as extra weapons and playable characters. "In-game characters controlled by individuals working for spam companies infiltrate these virtual worlds and bombard players with unsolicited ads for the sale of in-game virtual items like swords and even playable characters. Since cyber criminals need large audiences to perpetrate their crimes, they have begun preying on residents in virtual worlds and players in online games, particularly in Asia where these games have become extremely popular," explains Abhinav Karnwal, Product Marketing Manager APEC, Trend Micro.
The programs used by spammers also have the ability to steal player's IP address. Even though few games have a report spam option, only a good antivirus or antispyware is able to deal with such spams.
