Players of online games are increasingly becoming the target of virus writers, as more and more malicious programs are written to steal the login information for popular online games. Recent Microsoft research revealed a family of malicious programs aimed at titles such as Lineage, World of Warcraft, and Maple Story, where accounts are either hacked for in-game items or sold outright through black market retailers.

Cliff Evans, head of security at Microsoft UK, said its latest look at the software threats facing Windows revealed a strong growth in one family of malicious programs known as taterf. In the last six months, Microsoft has seen more than 4.9m infections caused by Taterf – a figure up 156% on the total seen in the last six months of 2008. Evans said the virus used a variety of tricks to steal login names and passwords for the most popular online games. “It’s all about getting login credentials,” he said. “The question is what might they do with those credentials…There’s clearly a financial angle to it that makes it worthwhile,” he said.

Another trend revealed in the research was a move away from fake security software. Statistics gathered by Microsoft show that the number of machines it found with such programs installed had fallen from 16.8 million machines to 13.4 million. In contrast, however, worms that travel networks independently looking for victims are making a comeback. Such self-guided programs are now the second biggest security threat to Windows users.

Source: BBC