Server discovered hosting millions of stolen gaming accounts

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Millions of stolen gaming accounts have been found on a server, according to security researchers, but it's not the number that has caused major concern.

Symantec has claimed that not only did it discover 44 million stolen accounts, but it also uncovered a trojan that has been validating all the accounts on a massive scale.

Eoin Ward, a security expert at Symantec, claimed what he called the Trojan.Loginck turned the 44 million details into “hard cash.”

“[The cyber criminals wrote] a program that checks the login details and then distributed the program to multiple computers,” he wrote on his blog.

“By taking advantage of the distributed processing that [this] option offers, you can complete the task more quickly and help mitigate the multiple-login failure problems by spreading the task over more IP addresses.”

Once each of the login details were validated, they could be sold onto other online scammers for anywhere between $6 (£4.12) right up to $28,000, in the case of experienced World of Warcraft user details.

Ward concluded: “As always, Symantec recommends that you keep your definitions up to date in order to ensure protection against new threats.” He added it would be a good idea to update your password, too.

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