Online Games a 'Playground' For Organized Crime

New submitter cadenceaniya sends this excerpt from Polygon: "Online games are a 'playground' for organized crime and cyber criminals, JD Sherry, vice president of technology and solutions at Trend Micro said following the news that League of Legends accounts were compromised. Earlier this week, account information — usernames, email addresses, salted password hashes, and some first and last names — for some North American League of Legends players were 'compromised' by hackers. Riot was also 'investigating that approximately 120,000 transaction records from 2011 that contained hashed and salted credit card numbers have been accessed.' The increase of free-to-play online gaming across all platforms over the years 'have opened the doors to micro-transactions in-game.' The simple and functional systems created so players can spend money effortlessly creates 'playgrounds' for cyber criminals take advantage of. 'Game platforms can have millions of users all storing sensitive information or code access for more features,' Sherry said. 'These are highly sought after in the cyber-crime underground for trading and selling in the black market. These platforms can fall victim to cyber-attacks just like any organization, especially if they have vulnerabilities that go unpatched.'"

MADLIB TIME!

[Ignacio]

Replace FOO with some type of online service in the following soundbite:

"FOO a 'playground' for organized crime."

Congratulations, you are now a security expert! Let's try it out:

"Social network services a 'playground' for organized crime."
"FTP servers a 'playground' for organized crime."
"VoIP providers a 'playground' for organized crime."

See! Wasn't that easy!?

No Security but Monitoring?

[Sir Holo]

A bit off-topic, but if games with online playability lack security, it by their choice. They certainly spy on their players enough.

Get an IP sniffer.

When I play StarCraft II, which insists on being online even for single-player, I get tons of connection attempts going places other than Blizzard. I block them, and gameplay does not suffer.

* www.reuters.com
* www.googleanalytics.com
* akami (OK, that's for downloading updates)
* sevreral other all-digit IPs, which I also block.