Saturday, August 14, 2010

WoW account hacking

The Ancient Gaming Noob asks how so many World of Warcraft accounts get hacked. I'm not sure, but I did notice that in my GMail spam folder these days a *huge* number of mails are World of Warcraft phishing mails. I get several "Cataclysm Beta Invites", or "WoW Account Management" mails every single day. In fact I now get more WoW phishing mails than spam trying to sell me Viagra or offering me the millions of dollars of a deposed Nigerian dictator. And unlike the regular spam, many of the WoW phishing mails are extremely well made, leading to quite realistic looking fake World of Warcraft account websites.

Lots of people are very afraid of trojans and keyloggers. But in my estimate the majority of hacking is decidedly low tech, done by phishing and password guessing. Very, very few people who report their account hacked can afterwards find malware on their computer.

No comments:

Post a Comment