Virtual Worlds and Fraud: Approaching Cybersecurity in Massively Multiplayer Online Games

We survey known security vulnerabilities in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), and describe how these are used to cheat. While such abuse often is aimed at gaining an edge in the game, there is a recent trend of financial fraud in MMOGs. We review common types of online fraud (such as phishing and click-fraud) that we believe increasingly will migrate into the MMOG sphere. We refer to the resulting abuse as virtual fraud. By defining a visual classification of virtual fraud, we lay a foundation to future investigations of the problem. We also use our visual classification to describe some types of virtual fraud that we believe may become particularly threatening.