Trojans infect 2.6 million systems, looking for gamer credentials

Mike Bantick
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 12:56

Your IT - Home IT

Multiplayer Online games such as World of Warcraft and Lineage are the target of keylogging Trojan software on a massive scale say Microsoft.  With the release of the latest Malicious Software Removal tool, Microsoft say this infection has outpaced all before it.  

Remember when joining in on an online community of like minded gamers to bake bread and assault dungeons together was what MMO gaming was all about? 

Of course there were always the dreaded monthly fees associated with the privilege of having your ass handed to you by a fifteen year old in the guise of heavily armoured Hafling.

It is account details for these games that Trojan software is hunting for.  Infected machines contain keylogging software that will map the keys hit when entering account information, and then fire it back to a remote location for sale to the highest bidder.

The June release of Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal tool has tuned up a remarkable level of infections worldwide.

According to Microsoft, the tool had now cleaned a whopping 2.6 million discrete systems, predominately of the Taterf malware program

"These are ridiculous numbers of infections, my friends, absolutely mind-boggling," said Matt McCormack, a security research for Microsoft, in an analysis of the latest results.

“After its first day in MSRT, Taterf components had been removed from over 700,000 machines! For comparison, Win32/Nuwar (aka ‘Storm worm’) was removed from less than half that in its first month.” McCormack said.