Tuesday 19 May 2009

Guild video scam alert

Today a scam was attempted on our guild, using in-game mail sent to several guild members.

This one is quite good. Whoever sent the in-game mail carefully chose a character from our guild who has an "i" in their name, then made a character with the same name but an accent on the "i", so the mail appears to come from a guild member - the difference between the two names is literally a couple of pixels.

The mail then directs you to an executable which no doubt contains a keylogger or something equally nasty, but claims to be a guild publicity video. Luckily the website has been taken down, but let this post serve as a warning, as this scam may be attempted again. I also recommend never downloading and running executables from the internet without virus and spyware scanning them first!

5 comments:

Crofe said...

They tried that on our guild too. Unfortunately one of our members visited the site. We think we got it isolated before anything could happen, and we got the warning out within our guild. Thanks for letting other people know about it.

Anonymous said...

scratch out the url for that site, in case someone decides to try it out :\

Hagu said...

If you download a program from the internet, it might just reformat your hard disk or something equally malicious. This is not a virus nor is it spyware, so the scanners will not detect it. While you should run virus software (or a Mac), they can't completely protect you if you download executables from the internet.

Rakhman said...

True enough Hagu, running executables downloaded from the internet should be done with suspicion - you need to be sure of the source of the exe and that it does what it claims to do. In this case I have no idea what that exe would have done, and definitely should not run it.

Race said...

This is still going around. My guild got it during our Yogg attempts last night.

thanks for the heads up.

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