In this day and age, thieves have gone high tech as well. Case in point: certain players of Blizzard's World of Warcraft have had their accounts hacked, and the hackers are apparently using virus-infected FRAPS. More viral news follows after the jump.

A powerful new Trojan virus has been discovered. While it's been reported that it can steal almost any kind of information from PCs, it seems to be limiting itself to stealing MMO user account passwords for now. The virus was hidden in digital photo frames that were being sold in Best Buy, Target, Sam's Club, and other retailers. Check out the full article for details.

In the world of organized crime, nothing is exempt as long as it will further their schemes. In line with this thinking, Symantec warned authorities with the possibility of criminals using online games such as World of Warcraft and Second Life for money laundering purposes. That's another form of online crime apart from piracy.

The two online games' use of microtransaction business models in exchanging virtual items for money makes it possible for organized criminals to "open several thousand MMOG accounts. Each could be used to trade with other players in the purchase or sale of in-game assets, the funds from which would ultimately be withdrawn from the accounts," according to the Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec.

With those myriad of accounts going through millions of transactions, tracing the true source of the accounts will ultimately become near-impossible.

Aside from money laundering, several online games are also being used to spread malicious software in the guise of downloadable updates. Unfortunately, some gamers often disable their security systems in their computers to optimize performance while playing, leaving them open for infections or attacks.

China is most affected by MMOG software attacks, with about 74 percent of the attacks directed towards the country. About 84 percent of Gampass attacks, one of the most malicious trojan codes, originated from China as well.

While there's not much you can do to make sure you account will stay away from money laundering, you can protect your computer from getting infected by making sure your anti-virus and firewalls stay on while you're playing.

From the looks of it, the Blizzard's World of Warcraft MMORPG's forums isn't the only place under siege from key-loggers and trojans. Curse-gaming - another site frequented by WoW's gaming community - has just sent out an urgent message warning members that there have been reports of emails being circulated that appear to have come from Curse's support staff.

The announcement further warned the residents that these bogus messages stated that they carried "updated addons" information, but were really links to downloads to Rapidshare servers with executables. Attempt to click on these emails, and you run the risk of having a trojan infecting your system.

As a further clarification of the fake emails, the staff indicated that only urls that carried official Curse downloads are on curse.com, cursebeta.com, or curse-gaming.com. We advise readers among the WoW gamers to take heed of this warning - keylogging's been on the rise lately, and given how much time and money are spent in creating a character for the game, it doesn't hurt to be extra careful.

 

Word got 'round - and got around real fast - that trojans were attached to the latest Blizzard Downloader and some of the patch executables for World of Warcraft. A couple of spyware detection programs identified malware signatures that spurred concern for computer security buffs in the community.

But Blizzard doused the community buzz down. According to Drysc, the trojan detected is actually a false positive - or a signature that might appear to be a spyware, but really isn't a threat. Blizzard has just recently looked into the issue after receiving the reports and found that it's only tied to a couple of popular malware detection programs.

That said, Blizzard has already contacted the companies of the programs and asked for a fix to address the issue, and some companies are already pushing out their respective definitions that should correct the detection of the false positive. If the developers of your program have not delivered their updates, Drysc recommends concerned users to update once new definitions become available.

Members of the World of Warcraft boards have detected what appears to be a keylogger over at the Icecrown boards. According to Madhava's explanation over at the posted thread, here was how the detected trojan worked:

Its not meant to fool the interceptor, Its meant to fool people. It disguises what website you are actually going to by using those escape functions. Firefox refuses to follow those links (for good reason), but I'm not sure about IE. My computer is pretty secure but I don't want to risk running that site on Internet explorer.

The hijacked site has an embedded link to malicious javascript hosted on a Chinese server. That javascript attempts to exploit the ANI exploit and the Iframe exploit to load a trojan named 'test.exe'.
'Test.exe' is detected by most antivirus as a trojan:
Trojan-PSW.Win32.Agent.im or Trojan.Agent.im
Basically a password stealer for WoW and maybe a backdoor.

Just a quick heads-up for any passing WoW gamers, all the more as keylogging incidents are becoming more rampant. Now, in case the guys here are wondering as to how to protect themselves (and their prized characters) from getting hoodwinked, make sure to check out the various security measures being circulated for your benefit. Play safely.

SonicWALL, a provider of various online security tools and backup and recovery solutions, have announced that users of their Unified Threat Management technology are protected against malware targeted towards players of Blizzard's dominant MMORPG World of Warcraft. SonicWALL notes that users of their dynamic threat prevention services are protected by the signatures:

• WOW.PU (Trojan) 4/4/2007 9:25:06 PM
• WOW.JE (Trojan) 4/4/2007 9:25:05 PM
• WOW.QG (Trojan) 4/4/2007 9:25:04 PM
• WOW.ET (Trojan) 3/29/2007 10:49:55 PM
• WOW.dldr.1 (Trojan) 3/23/2007 9:07:04 PM
• WOW.ET (Trojan) 3/23/2007 9:07:04 PM
• WOW.ES (Trojan) 3/23/2007 9:07:03 PM
• WOW.dldr.2 (Trojan) 3/23/2007 9:07:03 PM
• WOW.PU (Trojan) 3/12/2007 10:04:28 PM
• Wow (Trojan) 12/21/2006 3:52:15 AM
• Spy.WOW-53 (Trojan) 12/15/2006 1:58:21 AM
• Spy.WOW-39 (Trojan) 10/27/2006 1:47:06 AM
• Spy.WOW-38 (Trojan) 10/18/2006 1:19:40 AM

Alex Dubrovsky of SonicWALL's Security Centre says: "Although the malware currently only targets game players, it’s important to protect against it in the workplace since keystroke loggers bring risks into a business network."

Ironically though, unless you farm for a living, WoW itself seems more of a risk to "a business network" than the keyloggers that follow. Just total all the hours that could be eaten by a 40-man-raid?

One should never view the world through rose-tainted glasses. So if you think that the real world is the only one messed up, think again because the virtual world of MMORPG has been becoming a haven for all sorts of conflict and crime.

We earlier shared to you some ways to protect yourself from World of Warcraft key-logger scams, most would think that people would be more cautious, but apparently, more are falling prey to all sorts of duping in the MMORPG land.

Recently, an official WoW forum post mentioned that they want their community to be aware of a recent account-theft fiasco that is allegedly being circulated via email, game forums, in-game chat among many other mediums.

Apparently, this involves fake URLs that when clicked, will install the pesky key-logging software that will steal your WoW account name and password. Obviously, the scammers will then change your password and will lock you out, then they will sell all your items and transfer all of your gold.

Aside from that, a recently released trojan is also damaging accounts. Some websites have been exploiting a vulnerability in Windows and Internet Explorer. The result? The trojan loads into your system, steals your account names and password. With all that aptly mentioned, take extra caution and never treat the virtual world as a la-la land where nothing could go wrong.

Anything that appears to be lucrative or of value is susceptible to being abused or taken advantage of. The gaming industry is no exception to that.

Dave Weinstein, an engineer at Microsoft, has sent out a warning that hackers are now targeting online games. Massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG), like World of Warcraft, are particularly vulnerable to such attacks. These hackers break into players' account information by using malicious programs to sell virtual items, such as gold or weapons, for cash.

While the issue seems to be trivial, F-secure security specialist Mikko Hypponen maintains that this is a real problem. In fact, there have already been lots of cases concerning malicious programs that seek to steal players' account details. Earlier this year, almost a fourth of a million characters were created in Lineage, a Korean online game, using stolen identities.

Hypponen further explains that trojans are most commonly used by criminals to steal account details. This is supposedly a harmless program that collects login and password information. The catch is that these information are actually being sent back to the hacker. Once he takes hold of the password details of a character, the hacker can now login to the account and sell the characters' weapons, potions and spells. Trojans are often disguised as programs that will give a character special powers such as invisibility. Distribution may be done through in-game chat rooms or by e-mail.

At the annual Gamesfest conference in Seattle, Weinstein urged the developers to be up on their toes, especially now that there are serious security risks on their games. "Those of you who are working on massively multiplayer online games, organized crime is already looking at you," he said.