ACM TechNews

Playing Dirty

IEEE Spectrum (12/07) Vol. 44, No. 12, P. 32; Kushner, David

Richard Thurman successfully programmed his computers to play games automatically for the purpose of realizing profits in a game environment where virtual assets are bought with real money via credit card. Thurman developed an auto-playing robot by purchasing a program he used to reverse-engineer his target game environment's basic mechanisms, and then he wrote a piece of code that he embedded within the client software so it could communicate with a development environment for Windows computers. Once a communications link was established, Thurman purchased 30 commercially available PCs, each of which would play the game individually, creating and manipulating a character to earn gold, with character details randomly generated by software he wrote. Thurman shielded his identity by buying anonymous gift cards to set up accounts rather than using a personal credit card, and he programmed his computers to respond automatically to incoming data from the game server. So he would not be unmasked by company game masters who policed the game environment, Thurman constantly changed his IP addresses and also rigged his computer array to flag unusual surges of activity that may have indicated attempts to sniff him out. Massively multiplayer games are appealing targets for hackers not just because of the virtual economy they support but because they have gone mainstream, with all kinds of people--not just programmers and "nerds"--playing them. Such game-rigging, which critics claim violates the spirit of the games, is allowed because no real-world laws cover online gaming.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/dec07/5719

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