Hacking Online Games A Widespread Problem

[Peaches]

April 23, 2009 4:39 PM PDT

Hacking online games a widespread problem

by Daniel Terdiman

SAN FRANCISCO--It will likely come as no surprise to anyone familiar with virtual worlds and online games that they can be hacked. But what might come as a shock is the sheer breadth of types of exploits that are possible.

That was the broad message of a Thursday panel called, appropriately, "Exploiting Online Games" at the RSA 2009 security conference here.

Moderated by Gary McGraw, CTO of software security consulting firm Cigital and an author of several books, the panel took the audience on a deep dive into the diverse ways that hackers and others have figured out to either skim real money or to gain game play advantages not available to normal players.

McGraw opened the panel with a brief explanation of the fact that there are real, functioning economies in virtual worlds and online games, and that players cash in their virtual goods for real money, to the tune of more than $1 billion a year. This, of course, is old news to those in game playing circles, but for many of the security experts in the room, it may well have been eye-opening.

And, McGraw said, it's the very fact that real money is at stake that often gets otherwise uninterested game players to pay attention to the security risks they face every day.

"There's a whole bunch of normals (those not steeped in knowledge about computers) using games, and they don't care about security," McGraw said. "But they like their stuff, (and) when their stuff gets taken, that really hurts the hell out of them. That's a way to start a conversation about computer security with normals, because almost everybody knows somebody who plays online games."

CNET - http://news.cnet.com/security/