Iria

Mountain View (California) - The debate over the rights of individuals to protect themselves from intrusion by networks, versus the rights of networks to protect themselves from intrusion by individuals, has been raised to the next level. Veteran security expert Bruce Schneier confirmed reports that an anti-cheating tool called "The Warden," used by players of the popular network game World of Warcraft (WoW), collects information about all running processes in Windows, and reports back about those processes to the server of the game's publisher, Blizzard.

WoW gamers are familiar with "The Warden," which is installed as a security measure to disable known measures of cheating, and to unplug characters from the network where there is evidence of cheating. As we reported last month, some players were able to take advantage of a bug in the WoW game code, that exploited the capability of a virtual potion to inflict damage more quickly upon players with fewer experience points (XP). While this particular bug could be exploited through legitimate game play, most exploits are actually caused through direct hacking, especially by developing proxies that communicate with the server as though they were the WoW game client, reporting results that would be impossible through normal game play.

Such results can lead to the creation of virtual characters with disproportionate abilities compared to their experience, and that disrupt the stories of legitimate characters.

Last September, security software engineer Greg Hoglund, co-author of the book Rootkits: Subverting the Windows Kernel, noticed peculiar behavior while testing the development of a robotic character generator - in effect, a virtual operator for a virtual character. According to a Web site for open-source developers of such "'bots," Hoglund reported in one of its private forums that The Warden's behavior had apparently changed from what had previously been observed. Instead of looking for particular game-hacking programs, The Warden looks through all open Windows processes, searching for window titles with particular names: usually the names of known bots, which are often prefixed with the characters WoW!. Comparing Blizzard to the Gestapo, Hoglund suspected that the information being collected through this method was being passed on to Blizzard's server, and may result in Blizzard banning the 'bot character.
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Read More / Source: TG Daily