Kaspersky has released some interesting facts related attacks aimed at gamers. The aim of the fraudsters is to steal game accounts for market wealth virtual.
In many games like MMORPGs (games role-playing multiplayer online massive ) there domestic markets in which players can buy weapons and powers to their characters, often these markets move to the world real and the " gold virtual " happens to have a value for tickets , because if players are willing to buy things in the game itself Are also willing to buy them out at better prices.
the account of a player of World of Warcraft that 2009 was worth 4 000 euros after being stolen.
Games attacked between January 2009 and March 2010:
Realizing that a market exists around virtual goods is not surprising that cybercriminals are attacking this niche for profit.
- Maple Story
- Warcraft
- Perfect World
- Lineage
- Woool
- Cabal Online
- PlayOnline Viewer
- Mojie online
- Dekaron
- Gamania
- Huaxia II Online
- Tales Weaver
- SilkRoad Online
- Had
- Ragnarok Online
- Dungeon & Fighter
- Latal
- Seal Online
- Reign of Revolution
- Lying West Online II
Many of these games are very popular in Asia and most of the scams are aimed at players of this region , Kaspersky detects a day more than 3 million attacks caused by malware that try to steal game accounts . In Spanish, the countries most targeted are Mexico more than 125 thousand attempted attacks a day and Spain with over 93 thousand.
While are numbers soaring in recent months, the creation of new malware has decreased by a market saturation. There are many sellers and prices of the stolen goods dropped considerably.
In the next graph you can see the trend , the peaks of the first half of 2008 and 2009 relate to releases of new expansion for World of Warcraft:
The phishing is another common method for stealing accounts , the emails pretend to come from the manufacturers of games and fake sites are not uncommon . In the next image you can see some percentage of attacks detected , data is July 2010 :
In eighth place is World of Warcraft with a rate of 1.83% of phishing global , this is the multiplayer online game most popular in history and it is not strange that is most attacked.
Something remarkable is that cybercriminals are not based on the number of false messages sent, but focus on the good appearance and content to fool unsuspecting victims.
