World of Warcraft players desperate for a new mount to traverse the online role-playing game’s fantasy world are getting a reality check from hackers who have devised a clever pop-up phishing scam to spread malware.
Security technicians at F-Secure Security Lab on Tuesday posted a blog entry Tuesday detailing the latest scam making its way through the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
With more than 11.5 million monthly subscribers, Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft is not only the most successful MMORPG in history, but also a very popular environment for hackers, phishers and assorted click-fraud scam artists.
This latest hoax preys on players’ desire to add mounts for their online avatars to ride. After clicking on a link to get a new trial mount, players are redirected to a malicious phishing Web site that mimics an official WoW page.
Those players who are still hard up for a mount are then prompted to enter their WoW log-in details.
“Apart from losing all the gold and items saved, a compromised account could also be used to send out the malicious messages to other victims, adding insult to injury,” the researchers warned in their blog post. “An interesting detail about this particular site is that a reverse-IP check on its IP address turned up over a dozen other WoW phishing sites.”
F-Secure officials remind players that phishing sites like the one identified today are blocked by the security firm’s browser protection software.
World of Warcraft holds an estimated 62 percent of the MMORPG market. The third expansion set, Cataclysm, was announced at the BlizzCon conference earlier this year.