Advisories

Use Internet Explorer to Lose Your Dough

Second Life accounts - easy to steal

By Alexandru Dumitru, Security News Editor

19th of September 2007, 08:38 GMT

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If there is money somewhere on the web, then there's bound to be some hacker interested in that place. But I guess you've already noticed this. In any case, Second Life makes a lot of transactions happen. In case you've never heard of it, it's an online game, with close to 10

million people involved and some call it mind blowing. Just like you might have imagined by reading its name, this game offers the player a possibility to have a second life, as in: you create a character and it can do basically everything you might think of in a world built by others. Of course, you can interact with the world in any way and build stuff as well. With such interactivity, it's easy to see why this has captivated a lot of people.

So, where's the money? Well, the game is free, but if you want extra features, you have to pay for them. And of course, to get in-game money, you have to spend some real dough. For you to get an idea of things, one real-life dollar is something around 250 Linden dollars - that's the game's currency. So, you can imagine that a lot of folks put money in this game, and that's how it survives. So, this brings us to the theft:

Internet Explorer has some sanitizing problems and thus it makes it easy to hack an account for Second Life. Here is a blog by Petko D. Petkov that explains how easy it is to hack these accounts. It's a 6-step scheme, he says. You can get all the techie details on his blog. So, if you do have such an account, try using another browser (and not IE) and you might just be safer!

After the account is hacked, it's all down hill. So, the basic idea is that if you have a Second Life account and you use the famous IE, then you're prone to get your account hacked and your money stolen. This is not something to worry about� unless you have a lot of dough, of course.

TAGS:

second life | hack | IE | vulnerability

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