Gamers Targeted by Hackers, Kaspersky Labs Warns

Kaspersky Labs turned their attention to the gaming side of the Internet and found that gamers were the main target of cyber attacks around the world. Kasperski has identified 4.6 million pieces of gaming-focused malware to ruin your gaming experience.

”Gaming has an ever-increasing fanbase, which also means that the number of potential victims for cybercriminals is rising as well. The cybercriminals are taking a lot of effort into their attacks and we can see the upsurge in sophistication.

Click to expand...

LOL @ article images

That makes sense. People who play PC games on home built computers can get overconfidant in the capabilities of their computers and in their technical knowledge. They also tend to look in the darker corners of the Intertubes for nefarious stuff like pirated ISOs of games, keygens, and mods that can be loaded with viruses. MMO gamers are even bigger targets because of their tendency to spend a ton of real life money on a game they take very, very seriously to gain a minor advantage over someone else. I once knew this guy who had like five accounts in Online Space Spreadsheets (EVE) that also said he spent a lot of money buying game currency. And then there's the people in WOW that do the whole prostitution thing to get their epic flying mount. Sure you're not getting malware, but you might get a different kind of virus from doing that and it completely demonstrates how desperate, but completely into their gaming they get and the lengths they go to in order to get someplace ultimately meaningless in a world of pretend. It's no surprise that general group of people is going to get exploited with malware attacks because of those and probably a lot of other factors.

Makes me wonder about games with browser based (*coughEA-BF*) interfaces. Have they put the fox in the chicken house there?

There is an easy protection for this ... don't cheat and I don't be as stupid as the general herd of computer users out there and you will be just fine

It doesn't seem to be anything "new" that they're trying (well, according to the article). Just a regular ol' phishing and false patches/softwares on the consumer side and hacking on the business side.

I wonder what percentage of these attacks were targeted at WoW players.

Wait, people do actual, meatspace prostitution to get a Mount in WoW?

Why am I surprised? http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2007/04/world-of-warcraft-and-prostitution.html

Getting mounted for a mount

kbrickley said:

There is an easy protection for this ... don't cheat and I don't be as stupid as the general herd of computer users out there and you will be just fine

Click to expand...

Nothing to do with cheating... game companies get compromised server side, people offer add-ons packs for things like textures and so on that are completely legal...

I love the assumption only people who cheat are affected just like only gay men get aids?

Somewhat related: DDOS attacks on the AGDQ speedrun charity marathon, its sites, the French and German re-streams of it, and the difficulty in finding the children responsible for starting those attacks up and forcibly donating their organs and bone marrow.

I am relatively certain that i got a bitcoin mining virus from skyrim nexus (a repository of skyrim mods)


My av didnt see it. I traced its installation to some skyrim mod (really big mods) install times, after i noticed a hidden "miner" executable in my temp folder was using 50% of my cpu the next day.

Av still doesnt register it as a virus, but i have all the files, for giggles and shits.

AV is reactive, not pro-active, always has been, always will be, especially since most people install things as admin, or devs do crappy software that requires elevated rights, so your AV wont stop it anyways.

So under that is reported as a virus, likely wont get picked up.