Black Hat Briefings, Las Vegas 2006 [audio] Presentations From The Security Conference

"Online games are very popular and represent some of the most complex multi-user applications in the world. World of Warcraft® takes center stage with over 5 million players worldwide. In these persistent worlds, your property (think gold and magic swords), is virtual-it exists only as a record in a database. Yet, over $600 million real dollars were spent in 2005 buying and selling these virtual items. Entire warehouses in China are full of sweatshop‚ workers who make a few dollars a month to "farm" virtual gold. In other words, these "virtual" worlds are real economies with outputs greater than some small countries. Being run by software, these worlds are huge targets for cheating. The game play is easily automated through "botting", and many games have bugs that enable items and gold to be duplicated, among other things. The game publishing companies are responding to the cheating threat with bot-detection technologies and large teams of lawyers. Cheaters are striking back by adding rootkits to their bottin