The Malware Threat To Online Games Is Growing

We've been fighting off scumbag malware makers at every turn for years and now we have to worry about them targeting our games?

Gaming accounts are one of the hottest targets for black hats as we roll into 2015. Any form of financial investment in gaming – from paid memberships to rare in-game items – make consumers a prime target for hackers and scammers. Even if they’re locked down tight, criminals can still make use of personal information by going after platform holders and developers and stealing from the source.

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Hackers with SJW girlfriends?

Oddly, I have more security on my two gaming accounts than my banking accounts. If I log into a new system with the Arc client or any Arc game (Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, etc) I get an email and have to enter a PIN to get access. With my Blizzard games, I have an authenticator in my phone that is associated with my account. I have neither security measure for any of my banking accounts, and I don't know of a bank that has these type of security measures. It's pretty pitiful, really, that gaming companies have better security than banks.

I had a password change request on my arc account just this morning. Wish I could trace those dirtbags back and fry their sacks.

dgingeri said:

Oddly, I have more security on my two gaming accounts than my banking accounts. If I log into a new system with the Arc client or any Arc game (Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, etc) I get an email and have to enter a PIN to get access. With my Blizzard games, I have an authenticator in my phone that is associated with my account. I have neither security measure for any of my banking accounts, and I don't know of a bank that has these type of security measures. It's pretty pitiful, really, that gaming companies have better security than banks.

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People still play STO? I was once a heavy pvp'er (sad panda). I sometimes miss the game only to remember how much cheese they added when I left :/

Perhaps the attitudes and behavior of many multi-player gamers will kill off the multi-player gaming experience before the malware infections ruin it?

December 27th 2014, I receive a chat message from someone on my Steam friend list asking to trade. Her name is Lemon Juice and I played Gauntlet with her - she won some world records in the game.

I'm sent a link to a .png file. I don't think much of it, since it's a .png but ESET Smart Security traps a virus download in realtime. I sent Lemon Juice the following message:

I just received a message from you:

1:17 PM - LemonJuice: Hi m8, i want trade with you. need this items? {LINK REMOVED}

What's weird is

1) I don't have anything in my inventory that's tradable.
2) It said you were offline.
3) My anti-virus detected that a trojan virus was automatically downloaded from the URL.

So anyways, she's pretty computer illiterate, to the point of having relied on an "asian" friend to do remote logging into her system, to fix her computer in the past. I'm talking to Lemon Juice until 4:30 am, explaining the A's and B's of keystroke logging. I get her to download Malwarebytes & ESET Smart security. I get her to ditch the crappola software that she has been using as supposed anti-virus & PC tune up software.

The $40 in her Steam wallet is still there, so it seems like everything is OK ( apart from the 6 viruses on her system ). The next day she informs me that of her 1,000 DOTA 2 items, 800 is missing. She asks me what to do, I tell her to inform Steam asap - maybe they can run a trap and trace on the items? She tells me that just one of the high end swords is worth like... $300 - $400. At that point, I'm like holy shit?

The last I heard from her, she got 600 of the missing 800. Maybe she got the rest, I don't know. I got mad with her at one point and told her that if she's going to use computers, she's going to have to learn how to use them ( she didn't know how to reformat a hard drive ).

I dunno what happened after that.

^^^ I forgot to mention that they were trying to steal her entire Steam account but me, Lemon and Steam managed to intervene in time. Steam redacted the link that I posted on her profile page too.

MrAgmoore said:

^^^ I forgot to mention that they were trying to steal her entire Steam account but me, Lemon and Steam managed to intervene in time. Steam redacted the link that I posted on her profile page too.

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That's a pretty cool story. Kudos to you for staying up till 4:30 am saving someone from imminent loss.