Incredibly, there is a real market for the virtual assets such as armour and weapons in the online role-player game World of Warcraft.
It’s so lucrative, in fact, that hackers are trying ever more sophisticated ways of stealing players’ user names and passwords, in order to lay their hands on those virtual assets and sell them on. Sophos is warning that one such threat comes in the form of a spam email that lures unsuspecting users with explicit images before infecting their machines with a Trojan horse called Troj/Agent-LVF.
“A surprising amount of malware is designed to steal registration keys, passwords and data from players of computer games,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. “This isn’t just about doing better in a computer game. Criminals are stealing virtual assets like armour, money and weapons to trade for hard cash in the real world. Hackers love to exploit human weaknesses to break into users’ computers, and images of a naked woman may prove hard for some to resist.”
Sophos says spammers are using this and other explicit images to lure unsuspecting users to install a Trojan horse.
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