Crime Scene Re-investigation: A Postmortem Analysis of Game Account Stealers' Behaviors
This addresses account security for game users and companies, but is incremental as it builds on existing detection methods.
The study tackled the problem of game account theft by proposing a server-side detection system based on action sequence analysis, which identified hackers' behaviors with high accuracy in a real MMORPG and traced stolen money.
As item trading becomes more popular, users can change their game items or money into real money more easily. At the same time, hackers turn their eyes on stealing other users game items or money because it is much easier to earn money than traditional gold-farming by running game bots. Game companies provide various security measures to block account- theft attempts, but many security measures on the user-side are disregarded by users because of lack of usability. In this study, we propose a server-side account theft detection system base on action sequence analysis to protect game users from malicious hackers. We tested this system in the real Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). By analyzing users full game play log, our system can find the particular action sequences of hackers with high accuracy. Also, we can trace where the victim accounts stolen money goes.