Raunchy spam targets online gamers

Security experts are warning of a new malicious spam campaign designed to harvest the log-in credentials of online gamers.

According to a blog posting by security vendor Sophos, the spam emails arrive with the subject line “Do you like to find a girlfriend like me?” and contain the following message:

Wish to have a boyfriend

Be able to protect me, take care of me

Intolerable lonely night and would like to have your care.

do you Willing?

This is my photos.

Attached to the emails is a “my photos.rar” containing several sexually explicit images of a young Asian woman and a couple of executables which claim to be pornographic videos, but Sophos has detected as the Trojan Troj/Agent-LVF.

“Troj/Agent-LVF is a World Of Warcraft password stealing Trojan suggesting that the people who will install this malware are sad lonely men who play WOW,” read the blog posting.

According to Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley, a surprisingly large amount of malware in the wild has been designed to steal online gaming credentials such as registration keys and passwords.

"This isn't just about doing better in a computer game,” he added. “Criminals are stealing virtual assets like armour, money and weapons to trade for hard cash in the real world. Hackers love to exploit human weaknesses to break into users' computers, and images of a naked woman may prove hard for some to resist. ”