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Warning Signs
by Dennis Fisher
Today's online games illustrate tomorrow's security problems.
If you want a peek at the future of software threats and security, look no further than the alternate universe that is online gaming.
Once the exclusive domain of erstwhile Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts with too much time on their hands, online games such as World of Warcraft, EVE Online and The Lord of the Rings Online attract players from across the demographic spectrum and are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for their creators. World of Warcraft has more than 9 million registered players, and even casual players readily drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on monthly access charges, transaction fees and in-game purchases.
Inevitably, all of the real dollars, euros and yen flying through the air in these fantasy worlds are attracting the attention of skilled online criminals looking to make an easy score. Hackers have begun writing custom Trojans and keyloggers designed to steal players' account information, which they use to make fraudulent withdrawals from bank accounts or to sell characters and goods in online games. This new reality has raised some serious security concerns among both players and game ...
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developers. And those concerns are beginning to make their way into the enterprise as well, as security staffs are forced to confront the risks associated with employees using company machines to play these games.
But it's not just the security of the games that is so worrisome. The larger issue, experts say, is what these problems say about the future of enterprise security in an environment in which applications are increasingly hosted remotely and built on technologies such as Ajax, JavaScript and XML. If the present is any indication, the future is bleak, experts say.
"Our software systems are moving to new architectures that are massively distributed. As people adopt service-oriented architectures, the new generation of applications will look just like the massively multiplayer online role-playing games [MMORPGs] we see today," says Gary McGraw, CTO of software security firm Cigital and co-author of Exploiting Online Games, a book about game security published this year. "Most people who build software don't think the way that security people think. It was always about network security before, but now it's about making software work better. Warcraft has like 9 million users and 400,000 are online at any given time. That sounds an awful lot like an SOA design."
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