World of Spamcraft
What with it being Christmas and all, I’ve had quite a bit of time off work to waste and decided to spend it playing with a virtual dwarf in the online World of Warcraft. After choosing your race and profession in this game and thinking up a suitably formulaic and hard-to-pronounce fantasy name like Sak’t'tk’trath or Gaeaelen, your character is thrust into a land of snowy mountain peaks, dense jungle, blasted wastelands and magical forests. The game tries its best to immerse you in a world of heroism, war and adventure, and this works right up until you hit your first large city, at which point you’re likely to encounter many other characters with random letters for names shouting about how you can buy gold from their website for real-world dollars or euros.
So far, the spam in World of Warcraft seems mainly to be targetted at selling things related to the game — in-game currency, services that will play your character through to the highest levels for you and some more suspicious offerings such as programs that will, they claim, make your character immortal or able to fly. There is already plenty of malware designed to steal WoW accounts, and it’s not hard to imagine the distribution method for these Trojans includes spamming a link to them in-game.
Some of the gold-selling websites seem to be somewhat legitimate, despite the fact that they’re breaking the usage policy of the game by advertising in it. At least one of them, though, seems a little confused about the currency used in most of Europe.
Players and the game’s creators, Blizzard, aren’t too happy with the effect all this spam has on the game. The easy availability of free “trial” accounts capable of walking to the busiest areas and spamming them a few minutes after being created makes it very hard for Blizzard to deal with the problem just by banning the players that spam. What they do seem to have done, though, is implement some form of spam filters. Interestingly, this filtering seems to have had the same effect on spammers in the World of Warcraft as it has on email spammers here in the real world — instead of spamming out the actual domain name of the site they want people to visit, they continually register new domain names that redirect to the eventual site that sells their product. The game even has a “Report Spam” button for players to use when they encounter spammers.
With the growing popularity of World of Warcraft and online games in general, it will be interesting to see if we eventually see spam not just selling game-related products, but also flogging the usual tat — viagra, loans and questionable degree courses. I can’t wait to receive my share of that 20,000 gold that my new Orc friend stole from the Lordaeron treasury and needs to transfer to Kalimdor in a hurry, or to get my diploma in criminology from the University of Azeroth Online.
Posted on December 27th, 2007 by Niall, SophosLabs UKFiled under: Spam
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