Watch out, there are thieves
about. That’s as true in virtual worlds as it is anywhere else. Theft
of players’ accounts has blighted large multiplayer online games for years. But
a new approach that automatically spots suspicious activity could help catch
crooks in the act.
Kim
used to work in the security division at NCsoft, the publisher of Aion, a
fantasy themed online role-playing game popular in South Korea. Now Kim and his
colleagues have come up with a way to police online games automatically.
By analysing several months’ worth of data
from Aion, the researchers noticed that hackers often log in and out of stolen
accounts repeatedly, checking to see if the victim has realised that something
fishy is going on.
Thieves then tend to siphon off virtual items to a network of other accounts they control, often also stolen. The items are in effect shared out between an in-game criminal gang of characters, which usually makes them hard to trace.
But studying the data revealed that these characters often started behaving differently themselves. Instead of taking part in battles, they might suddenly begin trading items, for example. After training their software on the Aion data, Kim’s team found it could detect suspicious activity with more than 80 per cent accuracy.