Look Ma I Hacked Their Online Game Accounts
When we were eleven years old, our elders might have complained why we spent so much time playing on the Super Nintendo instead of going out of our homes and ride bicycles. Now that we are adults, we seem to think of the same with the app-playing kids of today, but some kids take it too far.
A new report from AVG indicates that children as young as eleven are apparently working on their program coding skills and using this knowledge to trick fellow online gamers into giving up personal information.
The report cited the app called “Runescape Gold Hack,” which promises to give free gold to players of the popular online role-playing game. Players are asked how much gold they want to receive, then type in the username and password for their Runescape accounts. While the players do receive the gold they requested, they do not realize the consequence.
First off, these Runescape players revealed their username and password without knowing how their information is being stored. The account information, according to AVG, are being sent to a specific e-mail address that was registered to an 11-year-old boy in Canada.
While the very young malware creator may have developed the hack to demonstrate his hacking ability, it could lead to something more criminal.
“This might seem trivial at first, but online gaming accounts are often connected to credit card details to enable in-game purchases, and these may also have virtual currency accounts amounting to hundreds of dollars,” wrote AVG’s CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak in his company’s blog. He added that some gamers even use the same login details for their social networking accounts like Facebook and Twitter, which could put them at risk of cyber-bullying and identity theft.
But it seems the hacker kid may need to step up his own online security, as AVG was able to find enough details in the app’s source code to track the identity of the kid, including where he currently resides and the fact that his parents had just gave him a new iPhone.
Source: AVG, via PC Magazine
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