Anything that appears to be lucrative or of value is susceptible to being abused or taken advantage of. The gaming industry is no exception to that.

Dave Weinstein, an engineer at Microsoft, has sent out a warning that hackers are now targeting online games. Massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG), like World of Warcraft, are particularly vulnerable to such attacks. These hackers break into players' account information by using malicious programs to sell virtual items, such as gold or weapons, for cash.

While the issue seems to be trivial, F-secure security specialist Mikko Hypponen maintains that this is a real problem. In fact, there have already been lots of cases concerning malicious programs that seek to steal players' account details. Earlier this year, almost a fourth of a million characters were created in Lineage, a Korean online game, using stolen identities.

Hypponen further explains that trojans are most commonly used by criminals to steal account details. This is supposedly a harmless program that collects login and password information. The catch is that these information are actually being sent back to the hacker. Once he takes hold of the password details of a character, the hacker can now login to the account and sell the characters' weapons, potions and spells. Trojans are often disguised as programs that will give a character special powers such as invisibility. Distribution may be done through in-game chat rooms or by e-mail.

At the annual Gamesfest conference in Seattle, Weinstein urged the developers to be up on their toes, especially now that there are serious security risks on their games. "Those of you who are working on massively multiplayer online games, organized crime is already looking at you," he said.