Cyber-criminals Targeting Online Gaming Websites 62
adeelarshad82 writes "According to a June 2010 Nielsen NetView survey on Internet usage, online gaming has overtaken e-mail in terms of the total percentage of time Americans spend online. Only social networking scores higher. On average, online gaming now consumes a staggering 407 million hours of U.S. citizens' time per year. Unfortunately, Nielsen's not the only one that noticed this trend; cybercriminals have taken note as well and are taking advantage of this by infecting games sites—from legitimate forums and tutorial sites to shadier download sites—to attack the unwary. Fortunately though, Avast has published a list of worst gaming sites."
Another security article boils down to one thing.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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AV programs tend to be easily bypassed. Instead, use what the parent suggested, but add AdBlock, IP blackholing, sandboxie, BetterPrivacy, and other items. These utilities will do a better job for keeping the Web browser from being a vector of infection than any AV software out there. If you need AV for Windows, grab MSE and call it done. If really paranoid, run your browsing in a VM that rolls back all changes.
My solution (Score:4, Informative)
If you need some decently secure web browsing, boot a Knoppix CD. By default it doesn't even mount your hard drives. And all changes to the ram side of the unionfs filesystem expire with a reboot.
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Oh that's right - I forgot. Knoppix runs on unicorn farts and zero point energy to make pictures on the screen. Never even touches the CPU. I should have mentioned that.
Thanks for the reminder.
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Knoppix should be in every person's toolbox. I use it for recovering systems, as well as zeroing out drives and partition tables before installing an OS.
However, that is a good point: If you need to do something without leaving a footprint on the system, or have all persistent data be moved to an encrypted (LUKS or TC) storage medium, Knoppix excels at this.
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My Level 80 Rogue shall stop them! Stop! Ninja Time!
The list (Score:1, Interesting)
Ok, here is the list of the worst offenders:
Gamesfactoryinteractive.com
Games-digest.com
Mariogamesplay.com
Anywhere-games.com
Galacticflashgames.com
Towerofdefense.com - hmm, this is one of the favourites of my kids...
So how do I set up my kid's netbooks (Firefox on WinXP) to not go there, for all accounts?
Re:The list (Score:5, Informative)
C:\WINDOWS\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS
0.0.0.0 Gamesfactoryinteractive.com
0.0.0.0 Games-digest.com
0.0.0.0 Mariogamesplay.com
0.0.0.0 Anywhere-games.com
0.0.0.0 Galacticflashgames.com
0.0.0.0 Towerofdefense.com
Re:The list (Score:4, Informative)
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS
0.0.0.0 Gamesfactoryinteractive.com
0.0.0.0 Games-digest.com
0.0.0.0 Mariogamesplay.com
0.0.0.0 Anywhere-games.com
0.0.0.0 Galacticflashgames.com
0.0.0.0 Towerofdefense.com
FTFY.
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Obviously this isn't robust and could be easily be thwarted with a proxy, the knowledge IP address, root access, etc., but it's super-easy to implement (for a *NIX user).
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Direct those urls to 127.0.0.1 in the hosts file.
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Go to new blank line and copy/paste:
127.0.0.1 gamesfactoryinteractive.com
127.0.0.1 games-digest.com
127.0.0.1 mariogamesplay.com
127.0.0.1 anywhere-games.com
127.0.0.1 galacticflashgames.com
127.0.0.1 towerofdefence.com
(Save the file)
Profit.
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You don't have to reboot windows for host file changes to take affect, at least I have never needed to on Windows 2000, XP, Vista or 7....
You might have to close your web browser, in rare cases an ipconfig /flushdns but reboot isn't needed.
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New process: Start -> "notepad c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts" (without quotes) -> ctrl-shift-enter -> Allow escalation, then continue as above
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I am amazed that you actually got some sensible answers rather than the expected "Windoze is 4 luzrs, use GNU Hurd instead".
Gaming Websites?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Those must be the most infested, never before known gaming websites in internet history. I think they must of paid somebody to put those sites in the article.
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407e6 (Score:5, Insightful)
On average, online gaming now consumes a staggering 407 million hours of U.S. citizens' time per year.
A whole hour and 18 minutes per person per year? That's nearly 0.0015% of the time! I don't see how the US ever gets anything done at that rate.
Re:407e6 [Mod Parent Up Please] (Score:1)
Indeed; this was my first thought also. Hardly staggering at all, is it? I'd mod you up + Informative had I mod points to do so.
The innumeracy of the summary, OTOH, is staggering... Come on, people, at least do a quick back-of-the-envelope sanity check, OK?
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innumeracy of the summary, OTOH, is staggering... Come on, people, at least do a quick back-of-the-envelope sanity check, OK?
Envelope? I've heard of that, I think, but where might I find one?
(Oh, wait; I found one. It was down in the basement, right there on a shelf next to the typewriter. ;-)
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Envelope? I've heard of that, I think, but where might I find one?
Glass houses, kid. I remember when I read this [ufopinball.com] and laughed. Learn from my mistake. It will happen to you too!
Oh, and get the hell off my lawn.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That number has to be off by a lot. There are what? 8 million WoW players? If WoW was the only game in the US, each WoW player would only be playing 51 hours a year? I've known people who logged that much time every week in that game and even my friend with 2 kids gets at least 8 hours of WoW a week.
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I know people who log twice that every week, and amazingly enough, almost 3 times that on some weeks (release days).
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Not necessarily: If you assume that half of the population aren't (online) gamers, then the number of hours per gamer doubles.
I'd be willing to guess that only one person in 5 is tech-savy enough to be a gamer (remember that 'the population' includes octogenarians and infants), and that only half of them actually are, meaning that each gamer in this senario is clocking up an average of 510 hours per year, or 9 and a bit per week.
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He's talking about WoW subscribers, those are definitely online gamers or they wouldn't pay 15$ a month for a specific online game.
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Worst gaming site list in case of slashdotting (Score:2, Funny)
Worst offenders, as of October 6, 2010:
Gamesfactoryinteractive.com
Games-digest.com
Mariogamesplay.com
Anywhere-games.com
Galacticflashgames.com
Towerofdefense.com
ea.com
Gambling? (Score:3, Funny)
Now, by gambling, do they mean e-trade and td-datek-ameritrade or whatever its called now?
Or checking out zillow zestimates and buying real estate, because real estate only goes up?
I believe second life got rid of all its casinos. Is second life still online?
Then theres the gamble of risking your reputation on online dating sites...
Pr0n? (Score:2)
So whats up with the 'if all us internet time were condensed into one hour' not having any time for pr0n? Or is that assumed diplomatically to be the 20m 36s piece of the pie chart?
What the heck is a portal and what have people been doing there for 2m 36s out of every internet hour? Is that the "make AOL your homepage" that only newbies do?
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So Avast loosing market share? (Score:2)
Free wasn't enough? (Score:2)
I'd agree with you if I hadn't been using their service for around 5 years for free, and had all my friends and relatives who needed a good home AV also use it for free.
They do have a paid version, but the free version is just fine. All they ask for is a little information you input yourself so its not like you even need to tell the truth except for a valid email address.
Surprise! Summary is wrong! (Score:2)
Gaming is 10% of the time spend online now, and it's pretty obvious that the average American spends more than 4 hours a year online.
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As someone up above posted, that's still only 1 hour, 18 minutes per month. That doesn't seem like much... but then I start to consider that probably a small fraction actually plays online games... I bet the mode (to the nearest hour) is probably closer to 20 hours a month than 1.
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As someone up above posted, that's still only 1 hour, 18 minutes per month. That doesn't seem like much... but then I start to consider that probably a small fraction actually plays online games...
I think it also depends on whether the respondents who play Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc. classified their time spent on those games as Online Games or Social Network. I definitely have a hard time imagining 1hr 18min/month average with all the Facebook games thrown in.
Sites powered by Google Ads (Score:5, Informative)
Looking at the list of "evil sites":
I ran them all through SiteTruth [sitetruth.com], which, unsurprisingly, can't find a legit business behind any of them and thus down-rates them as junk sites.
As usual, THIS IS A WINDOWS PROBLEM (Score:1, Redundant)
Typically not mentioned in summary.
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Agreed. NOBODY uses WINDOWS anymore. Especially not those with poor security habits.
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This is a Games article. It doesn't need to.
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
so, other* == porn? (Score:1)