Real-money traders beware! ArenaNet is cracking down on those accounts who are engaging in dubious trading practices such as real-money trading in its premier MMO title Guild Wars. In our full article, you can take a look at some of the preventive measures the company is implementing to police such activities in the game. Read more on this after the jump.

A powerful new Trojan virus has been discovered. While it's been reported that it can steal almost any kind of information from PCs, it seems to be limiting itself to stealing MMO user account passwords for now. The virus was hidden in digital photo frames that were being sold in Best Buy, Target, Sam's Club, and other retailers. Check out the full article for details.

About a month ago, Blizzard sent out an explanation that several trojans that were detected in their World of Warcraft patch updates were false positives - they were giving out a signature that looked like spyware, but weren't actually a threat.

The false positive reports were then connected to several popular malware/virus detection applications (ex. AVG), with Blizzard subsequently contacting the app's corresponding companies for a fix to the problem.

But then, when is a false positive truly false?

We'll be using the case of Lonecrow as an example, who gained infamy at the WoW forums after he accused the company of hacking his character, and stealing all of his 850 gold and gear. Going into detail into this incident, Lonecrow explained that the hack occurred a day after he updated to new game patch - a patch that set off alarms on his AVG application. Lonecrow further noted that a total of three files supposedly infected with trojans were detected - these files are among those that Blizzard labelled as false positives.

And while the prospect that Blizzard as a company may have hacked Lonecrow sounds absurd, the incident does leave room for speculation. For one, why did the hack only occur after the patch download? Such a short time span between the patch update and the (possible) crime entails that the patch may have something to do with the hack.

Secondly, Lonecrow indicated that he didn't visit any 3rd party sites, which in turn means his patch updates were directly from Blizz. As the victim himself stated, this may be the work an insider - somebody who may have a good reason to steal his loot and had access to Blizzard's database.

Of course, this is pure speculation on our part - whether the readership decides to dismiss this as yet another tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory or a possible glimpse of a possibly bigger fish...we'll leave for future discussions.

 

Word got 'round - and got around real fast - that trojans were attached to the latest Blizzard Downloader and some of the patch executables for World of Warcraft. A couple of spyware detection programs identified malware signatures that spurred concern for computer security buffs in the community.

But Blizzard doused the community buzz down. According to Drysc, the trojan detected is actually a false positive - or a signature that might appear to be a spyware, but really isn't a threat. Blizzard has just recently looked into the issue after receiving the reports and found that it's only tied to a couple of popular malware detection programs.

That said, Blizzard has already contacted the companies of the programs and asked for a fix to address the issue, and some companies are already pushing out their respective definitions that should correct the detection of the false positive. If the developers of your program have not delivered their updates, Drysc recommends concerned users to update once new definitions become available.

SonicWALL, a provider of various online security tools and backup and recovery solutions, have announced that users of their Unified Threat Management technology are protected against malware targeted towards players of Blizzard's dominant MMORPG World of Warcraft. SonicWALL notes that users of their dynamic threat prevention services are protected by the signatures:

• WOW.PU (Trojan) 4/4/2007 9:25:06 PM
• WOW.JE (Trojan) 4/4/2007 9:25:05 PM
• WOW.QG (Trojan) 4/4/2007 9:25:04 PM
• WOW.ET (Trojan) 3/29/2007 10:49:55 PM
• WOW.dldr.1 (Trojan) 3/23/2007 9:07:04 PM
• WOW.ET (Trojan) 3/23/2007 9:07:04 PM
• WOW.ES (Trojan) 3/23/2007 9:07:03 PM
• WOW.dldr.2 (Trojan) 3/23/2007 9:07:03 PM
• WOW.PU (Trojan) 3/12/2007 10:04:28 PM
• Wow (Trojan) 12/21/2006 3:52:15 AM
• Spy.WOW-53 (Trojan) 12/15/2006 1:58:21 AM
• Spy.WOW-39 (Trojan) 10/27/2006 1:47:06 AM
• Spy.WOW-38 (Trojan) 10/18/2006 1:19:40 AM

Alex Dubrovsky of SonicWALL's Security Centre says: "Although the malware currently only targets game players, it’s important to protect against it in the workplace since keystroke loggers bring risks into a business network."

Ironically though, unless you farm for a living, WoW itself seems more of a risk to "a business network" than the keyloggers that follow. Just total all the hours that could be eaten by a 40-man-raid?