Zynga hacker faces jail after $12m theft

This is a story that just amuses me, even though it actually does turn out to involve real money.  Anyone who has been on Facebook probably knows that there are poker games available on the site. Now in the States, these are just social games played for virtual chips that aren’t worth any real money.  In countries that allow legal online gambling, some of the same companies that offer virtual games offer real money games.  But for me, the interesting thing about the even the virtual chip games in the United States is that while players can’t win real money, they can spend real money on these virtual chips.  This is all part of the Facebook marketing process. Players are only given a certain number of chips each day.  Now, they can win chips by playing in poker games, but if they lose their chips, there are only certain ways to get more chips.  They can wait for the next day and new chips. They can ask friends to send them chips.  They can take part in surveys or other advertising offers that will earn chips. Or they can purchase virtual chips for real money. That’s right – players pay real money for chips that have no real value.  Well, except the value to keep playing.

But the news I’m seeing today is that a computer hacker in the UK hacked into Facebook and the popular poker site Zynga and transferred 400 billion chips to accounts he controlled. Then he sold these virtual chips on the black market.  Black market? Yes, apparently there is a black market for Zynga poker chips.  The hacker made 53,000 pounds from those 400 billion chips, so apparently each chip doesn’t have that much value.  But the hacker is still going to jail. Real jail, not virtual jail.

Hacker Attack

Community Statement
13/01/2011

Dear Players,

As many of you are already aware, we have all fallen victim to a virtual attack.

An anonymous attacker has threatened to release log-in data unless his terms are met. He is demanding that forum communication practices and technical aspects of Runes of Magic operation be changed. To support his claim, the attacker has already posted the log-in details of approx. 2,100 accounts to the forum. To protect the affected players, the posts in question were naturally removed immediately and secured as evidence. The attack constitutes a serious criminal offence, and we immediately informed the German State Office of Criminal Investigation and pressed charges.

It is important to note that the data released was outdated log-in data from 2007, long before our comprehensive password reset initiative. Nevertheless, we immediately blocked the relevant accounts (account management, forum, and game access) of the affected players for their protection. Accounts changed by you after the password reset have not been affected thus far.

We promptly assembled a task force and are of course making every effort to get to the bottom of this incident. We are utilising every means at our disposal to minimise the damage and to prevent such threats in the future. We have already implemented additional security measures today. As soon as all the necessary steps have been taken with regard to operational and criminal processes, we will inform you of further developments on this matter.

This incident is very distressing to all of us. It is targeted not only at Frogster as a company, but also at Runes of Magic as a virtual biosphere and at you as players. We are always open to constructive suggestions. However, giving your opinion on blackmail and extortion is surely not the correct approach.

In conclusion, you may rest assured that all players not affected by the attack can log in to the game and play without any problems or hindrance. Should you have any remaining questions on this matter, you can always count on the Community Management team for advice. Just send them a PM and they will gladly assist you.

Mike “Silberfuchs” Kiefer, Lead Community Manager: Runes of Magic

၁၂၄၁ခုနွစ္မွစရ္ ကေလးေဆးမ်ားသာ ထုတ္လုပ္ျဖန့္ခ်ိလ်က္ရွိေသာ
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 အမွတ္(၈၁) ၊ အတက္ၾကည့္ျမင္တုိင္လမ္းမၾကီး၊ ေစ်းၾကီးအေရွ.ရပ္၊
   ၾကည့္ျမင္တုိင္၊ရန္ကုန္ျမဳိ.၊ ဖုန္းနံပါတ္ ၀၁-၅၃၅၀၄၈

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ေဒၚမာလာေအး      နံနက္ ၁၁နာရီ မွ မြန္းလြဲ ၂ နာရီ

cracker

A cracker is someone who breaks into someone else's computer system, often on a network; bypasses passwords or licenses in computer programs; or in other ways intentionally breaches computer security. A cracker can be doing this for profit, maliciously, for some altruistic purpose or cause, or because the challenge is there. Some breaking-and-entering has been done ostensibly to point out weaknesses in a site's security system.

The term "cracker" is not to be confused with "hacker". Hackers generally deplore cracking. However, as Eric Raymond, compiler of The New Hacker's Dictionary notes, some journalists ascribe break-ins to "hackers."

A classic story of the tracking down of a cracker on the Internet who was breaking into U.S. military and other computers is told in Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg.

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