The virtual world is a playground for cyber criminals who are interested in laundering money and stealing data, according to security firm McAfee. The in-game economies of the virtual world are being seized by criminals who try to hide their profits through the exchange of virtual currencies. Dr Igor Muttik, a senior architect at McAfee’s Avert Labs, has published a white paper entitled Securing Virtual Worlds Against Real Attacks - The Challenges of Online Game Development.

The paper claims that normally, when a gaming account is compromised, attackers will change the objects they steal into virtual currency - and after that again convert the virtual currency into real money. Scammers are very much attracted to virtual worlds, whereas they work on various ways to try and steal private data for fraud. For example, sloppy scripting in some online games lets viruses to auto-execute and spread. There are also phishing attempts and messaging spam that lure members to malevolent websites for ‘free’ games.

There is a huge increase in data-stealing Trojans that utilise keystroke loggers and other software to record IDs and passwords, mouse movements and screenshots.