Over the last few months over 1 million WoW accounts (approximately 1/10th of the total number of accounts) were hacked by a specialized keystroke recording virus.
The selling of Game "gold" and other in-game objects is becoming a business. Even if the average resale of the items in these 1 million accounts (which included access to any guild vaults), could be sold for only $100.00 on the internet. That adds up to $100,000,000. And the customer base for buying this stuff is there! Let's say that the corporation that ran this keylogger could only sell 1% of what they stole ( a pretty low estimate) that is still a potential return of $1,000,000. All they have to do is sell the stuff at a reasonable rate so not to saturate the blackmarket.
Hacking these type of games is no longer in the realm of 15 year old kids. It is a business. The return on investment for this crime is pretty good. This keylogger was undetectable by the majority of security scanning programs.
Hacking accounts and selling the items for real money has gotten so bad that Blizzard has started offering security code fobs for their customers to secure their accounts. This is one of the same technologies the government uses to safeguard highly sensitive information.
These online games and the hacking of same is big business. I expect other online games to have fobs soon.
Kudos to Blizzard for working the problem.
