Cyber Criminals Increasingly Hacking into Gaming Accounts

Garlik, an online identity company, has warned that there is an increasing trend of cyber-criminals attacking online gamers to reap the latter's financial and personal information that could value anywhere up to 4.5m pounds an annum.

The company further alerted that Steam the delivery platform for digital content is an extremely frequent target of hackers who post infected materials in connection with different titles that normally carry malicious Trojan.

Phil Elliott, Managing Editor of GamesIndustry.biz a Videogames Commercial Site, says that account theft related to online games is indeed an increasing problem, and although some organizations have made efforts towards countering such activity, it continues to be a threat that most gamers don't regard with enough seriousness, as reported by Security Watchdog on June 22, 2009.

Elliott adds that there is an obvious danger of hacked personal data being potentially used for even more treacherous activity.

Moreover, Garlik's study performed an assessment of illicit buying and selling of users' sensitive data on programs like Sony Play-Station, Microsoft Xbox as well as World of Warcraft. Accordingly, the company estimated that every year about 500,000 credentials from users of Xbox Live are being bought and sold at a value of approximately 100 pounds for every batch of 20 accounts.

News of this follows merely days after Webroot the security vendor stated that there was a huge number of information stealing Trojans that phished for gaming accounts' usernames, passwords and licenses.

Andrew Brandt, Security Researcher at Webroot, says that these Trojans designed for a single purpose are very effective and they rapidly and quietly transmit the desired data back to their controlling servers that are typically based in China, as reported by Security Watchdog.

Notably, Trojans stealing online gaming credentials ranked the most serious malware during May 2009, according to the May 2009 Threatscape Report of Fortinet.

Thus, to reduce users' exposure to such threats, Garlik has advised Internet users to necessarily use different passwords for online banking, gaming as also other accounts. Also they must deploy quality and up-to-date security software to enable easy detection and elimination of any gaming Trojan that might infect their computer.

» SPAMfighter News - 02-07-2009

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