Gamers risk losing credentials to hackers

First it was banks and now it is online gamers. As global internet usage continues to grow, cyber criminals are training their eyes on the net gaming community for their next big hit, according to specialists from computer security company McAfee.

Experts at the firm’s Avert Labs research centre have named the 10 security threats they expect to be the most serious in 2008. And they revealed that the number of password-stealing Trojans, or malicious software, that targeted online games in 2007 grew faster than the number of Trojans that targeted banks.

“The threat to virtual economies is outpacing the growth of the threat to the real economy,” they reported. “As virtual objects continue to gain real value, more attackers will look to capitalise on this.”