Games within games

By some estimates, there are in excess of 250 million online gamers worldwide.  The revenue associated with this is in excess of $8billion in 2007, with it forecasted to grow to just short of $10billion in 2008. You know the drill: where there are many users and a lot of money, then the bad guys are sure to coming calling.

By our estimates, there are in excess of five thousand Trojans that have been developed with the purpose of stealing user details from computer games.  Getting access to a ‘gamers’ account can be very valuable and lucrative for the bad guys.  They can use the old ploy of extorting money from you to get your account ‘back’. Or, they can simply sell-on your account to someone else.  There have been instances of the bad-guys raiding and accumulating valuable on-line game paraphernalia, e.g. swords, shields, weaponry that has a ‘value’ and then ‘cashing this out’ into real money.

In advance of the ‘Dreamhack’ event in Sweden later this month, my colleagues in Sweden have created an interesting YouTube posting - you can see it below . It walks you through some of the potential issues that are posed by computer games as well as giving some pointers as to how to avoid some of these threats.

June 3, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized 

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