14 DAY TRIAL // Lewys Martin, a 20-year old man from Deal in Kent has been sentenced for 18 months in jail after making money from the distribution of a hack for the popular first-person shooter Call of Duty that was actually a piece of malware.
The hack was actually a piece of software that allowed Martin to monitor keystrokes from those who downloaded and ran it in order to obtain bank and credit card information, including passwords, which he then sold as bundles through specific websites for prices that ranged from 1 to 5 dollars or Euro.
The money he made from the activity was then moved to an offshore account located in Costa Rica.
The Call of Duty hack and malware trick would have probably worked for longer if Martin had not tried to steal computer equipment from colleges near his home.
The police caught him and then found details for more than 300 credit cards and passwords in his home.
Prosecutor Edmund Burge stated, “We don't know how much money he got through selling the card details because the money is in a bank which won't co-operate with the authorities. But Martin admitted to police that it was in the thousands of pounds.”
Graham Cluley, a security expert with Sophos, has stated, “Game players would pay attention to the technique used by Lewys Martin to infect computers. It's not uncommon for malware to be distributed in the form of cracks and hacks for popular computer games - if you run unknown code on your computer to meddle with a video game, you might well be allowing malware to insidiously install itself too.”
At the moment Activision is working on a new Call of Duty title, called Black Ops II, which will be launched on November 13 of this year on the PC, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360.