Reported Post by Tiemen

Tiemen · Mar 19, 2011

Tiemen has reported a post.

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Post: gf 170B
Forum: RuneScape 2 Cheating
Assigned Moderators: Gohan, Louis, HamJam, Sacro, KerokeroCola

Posted by: already over
Original Content:

Hi everybody,

You may be aware that a player with a considerable amount of in-game wealth was hijacked recently. We donâ€™t want to invade that playerâ€™s privacy by naming names, but we understand that this topic is raising a lot of discussion among the community.

As soon as we became aware of the situation we acted quickly banning the hijackerâ€™s accounts as well as removing any items & wealth stolen.

Unauthorised access to online accounts whether it is your bank account or your RuneScape account is a criminal offence, it is illegal in the UK under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and the USAâ€™s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act 1986 as well as equivalent legislation in many other countries around the world. Jagex have already successfully pursued a RuneScape hijacker in the UK using the above law. You can read about it on the BBC news website here.

We want to send a clear message that hijacking is not clever and will not do you any favours, it is an illegal act and we regularly send information onto local law enforcement agencies.

Currently we do not return lost/stolen items. This is why it is so important to make sure your account is as secure as possible.

Make sure you do the following;

Set a Bank Pin. This will help protect your items if the worst happens and somebody accesses your account.
Set a Email Address to your account to help recover your account and secure it from others trying to gain access to it.
Choose tough Passwords that arenâ€™t easy to guess or very common.
Donâ€™t input your Username/Password into other websites! The only website you should use your RuneScape Username/Password for is the main RuneScape website.

Mod Mark H
On behalf of the RuneScape Player Support Team
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The arrest could be the first of many targeting fraudsters, said Jagex

A British man has been arrested and cautioned for stealing accounts for online game Runescape.
Jagex, creator of Runescape, said it was likely to be the first of several arrests as it tackled in-game fraud.
Online game Runescape has more than 100 million active players and play revolves around collecting and spending virtual cash and loot.
The company said it was working with UK police and the FBI to track down and catch those targeting Runescape.
Crime trail
A statement from the Police National e-crime unit said: "A 23-year-old man was arrested in Avon and Somerset on the morning of Tuesday 24 November by officers from the Police Central e-crime Unit, on suspicion of a number of computer misuse offences."
The offences are believed to be for using phishing e-mails to trick people into handing over login details for Runescape accounts.

Hi-tech thieves target online games because virtual goods are easy to launder
Once hi-tech thieves have these credentials they plunder the accounts, strip characters of their items and sell off the rare virtual goods for Runescape gold. This virtual money can be traded to others in-game or sold for real world cash.
Current underground exchange rates suggest that 2m Runescape gold costs about Â£6 ($10).
"We have pinned down and identified the handful of ring leaders and we are going after them with both barrels," Mark Gerhard, chief executive of Jagex told BBC News.
"Any online games company will tell you that as soon as the game has value, there's a very small foreign element that tries to exploit that value," he said.
Mr Gerhard said the arrest on 24 November was not the result of something that happened the day before. It was one result, he said, of a long term investigation that had sought out those behind the phishing attack that caught out a "few thousand" Runescape players.
The biggest audience for Runescape is in the US and UK and Mr Gerhard said it was working with forces in both nations to track down the virtual thieves. He predicted that there would be more arrests as Jagex knew the handful of people behind the crimes and where they were based.
Laundering cash
Trade in Runescape game gold is against the terms and conditions of the game and Jagex has made many changes to its underlying code to stamp out gold farming in which players repeat activities that generate lots of virtual cash or valuable items.
Mr Gerhard said its efforts to tackle gold-farming may have forced the thieves to try a different approach.
"Once you close one vulnerability you move the attack surface to another part," he said. Jagex's efforts to tackle farming had removed 90% of the problem, said Mr Gerhard.
"They were going directly after the user credentials and trying to get at the wealth that way," he said.
"Players invest years of time and effort into developing their Runescape character so the theft of a Runescape account shouldn't be treated differently to the theft of any other valuable possessions such as a games console, television or car," he said.
Alisdair Faulkner, a computer security expert at ThreatMetrix, said it was seeing many more hi-tech thieves turn to stealing virtual rather than real goods.
Virtual goods were much easier to launder and dispose of than tangible items such as flat screens and computers, he said. It was a particular problem in Asia where the sales of virtual game goods were well established.
Many thieves stole credentials from networks of hijacked home computers - known as botnets - or used them as proxies to make the theft look like it was coming from a legitimate source.
"For some of these botnets their sole purpose is to act as a gateway to help fraudsters," he said.
ISPs, merchants and other firms were using ways to pierce a proxy and find out who was really in charge of it, said Mr Faulkner.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8386003.stm
http://services.runescape.com/m=forum/forums.ws?14,15,106,62560262

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