Superbowl Site Hacked For World Of Warcraft Passwords

Maybe I missed this in the fury that was the Bears repeatedly trying to run the ball up the middle of the field. C|Net reported a while back that Dolphin Stadium's web site was hacked prior to the Super Bowl to add malicious code (pictured, via TechRepublic) which was intended to lift passwords from vulnerable computers.

The same code was also passed to several other high profile sites. Which passwords came later:

Ullrich said the malicious Trojan originated from a domain in China, which has also been terminated. He said early evidence suggests that the likely culprit may be a Chinese gold farming syndicate linked to the online role-playing game World of Warcraft.

"It almost looks like this Chinese group had a script that looked for a particular vulnerability in an order of mass on all these sites," Ullrich said.

-- Dozens of Web sites spread malicious Trojan

So let's sit back and ponder this a moment. A crime syndicate hacked web sites to gain passwords in order to farm virtual gold to undoubtedly sell on the open market. Here I thought the seedy underbelly of the net was mostly spam kings, DoS blackmailers and Russian hackers. Clearly the age of the Geek Mafia is upon us.




tagged: game, gaming