When we play muliplayer online game,...

Hi all,

Whenever we play multiplayer online game, we need to connect to official or 3rd party game server.
Sometimes there is disconnection and then auto-connect back to game server.
(Does this really connect to the same server? or, connecting to unknown server?)
With firewall and anti-virus software installed, is it safe to play multiplayer online game?
Are there any precautions that we could protect our pc from hacking and leakage personal data?

Thanks in advance
:D

The only real issue, although not really one, is downloadable content.

I wouldn't even worry about getting viruses/spyware from playing a game online (unless it is in a browser, as the browser is much more vulnerable).

@Plash:

This is because they could always be detected by firewall or anti-virus???

if you use pirated games you will have problem with trojans ans viruses, if you buy a game then you should not worry :)

I bought licensed game. :D

The question is: is the game server safe?
ie. shall we get any trojans or viruses, when we connect to these servers?
If not, what precautions should we take to protect our pc?

In my years of playing multiplayer games I have never experianced a trojan or virus attack ... I connect to many servers worldwide when plating Team Fortress and have had no problems. Just make sure you have a good firewall and antivirus software.

yes you are correct to asume that the game is not serversave, if you bought a licensed game and this game developer wanted to screw its user base they could easily install a trojan on your computer, also if you are afraid of some other user hosting the server where you connect and sending you trojan that is also posible, since the client you are using could have bugs that were not discoreved by the devoloper and hackers could use this if they wanted, but why bother, user base would probably be too small and not worth the time etc ;) they can use other means and spread the virus or trojan much more quickly

There are no known virus which delivery their payload in this way. It would be monumentally harder to develope, require frequent updating of the virus itself to stay ahead of the developers and target a much smaller audience. It's so not worth trying to do this, infact, that even corporate espionage doesnt bother.

They'll happily hack and undermine each others online games, but none go as far as delivering virii into clients this way simply because of the difficulties associated.

Firewall does not protect you at all in this instance as it is you establishing the connection to the outside world, indeed anyone on an ethernet or wireless router already has the best firewall going - better than any software. Firewalls are only an issue when a machine has direct access to the outside world - ie: on a dial up modem, or on a server in a datacentre.

Anti-Virus software is something I begrudgingly use these days, most of it is utterly useless at detecting and removing any virus you are likely to be infected by, but a full system scan can't be a bad thing to do - but it's email and torrents which cause most virus' to install, and to a lesser extent browser vulnerabilities. Spyware/Adware is also common with popups and anti-virus tools are quite good at dealing with those.

The biggest threat to online gaming security is actually from "gold farmers". People who hack accounts to sell off your items and transfer the gold/platinum/credits/whatever to paying customers.

The only real security against that which i've seen is the Blizzard Authenticator for World of Warcraft which gives you a hardware device to generate a code to enter in addition to your password which is checked server side.

The other reason why it wouldn't happen is because nearly all servers for multiplayer games like COD etc are all run by very reputble companies like jotl.co.uk, gameservers, inx-gaming etc and many others. These companies rent the servers to people, 16 man, 32 man and 64 man servers to people and they have almost all control of them except for disbaling virus scanning on the servers, malware control etc. What I've noticed from all of the ones I've tried in my tim is they all don't allow software reboot of the servers for users who rent them but instead it has to be requeste and they do it themselves.

When I was younger and was doing the whole clan thing all of us in the clan chipped in for the best server, 64man, with other features etc.

I think the only way viruses could spread through multiplayer servers is when people use the pirate version of the game and the cracked multiplayer client to be able to gain access to cracked servers.

Your basically at the mercy then of whoever runs the cracked server, most of them being hosted in places like china etc.

Typically this is because when you rent a game "server" you're actually renting a machine hosting several 'servers'. I know of one online game where a server reseller is hosting several hundred 'servers' on just a handful of actual server machines - because most of the time they sit empty so the machine is actually idling.

It does depend a lot on the game itself, some "dedicated server" applications are really apallingly written and use almost as many resources as running the game client.

None the less, if you are paying less than £100 a month for it then you for sure do not have a dedicated computer - and giving restart control to the end users would allow you to grief other server operators.

When it comes to pirate servers there still isnt much security risk from online games, and certainly the risk of virus install by connecting to a pirate server is near zero.

Where the pirate scene will willingly infest you with virii is when you download either server or client applications.

Even if you connect to a server that is virused the odds are the virus will not transmit to your machine - even if you have no firewall or anti-virus software - via the communication sockets in the game itself.

One of the reasons for this is the game will be receiving the data, not the operating system, and the binary data in the virus would more than likely kill the application.

In order to actually launch a virus attack over a multiplayer game the game would have to have some means of transfering files and saving them out to disk, and then some means of launching that file. Whilst some games do allow some form of file transfer, Second Life for instance or in games where you can customise your avatar texture like Live for Speed. What is lacking is the means to then launch that file.

Additionally for a virus to actually hack into the communication socket of the server to inject it's payload into the data connection between you and the client it would require installing a fairly low level network driver to act as an interpreter to hook into. Otherwise the port would already be open and the OS would not give the virus access to it.

Doing this is very hard, i've tried writing low level network drivers before myself to no avail, it's really very difficult. Not only that, but installing it requires system administrator privaleges and whilst home users may be lapse on this server operators typically are not, meaning that somebody would have to manually install the virus in order to infect the server.

Thank you for your attention and information.
:D

I just found an article whose title is "Online games and fraud: using games as bait" (by Kaspersky)
http://www.viruslist.com/en/analysis?pubid=204791963

(This article was written in Sep 10 2007. The current situation may become worst.)

Related articles:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/11/online_games_hacking_trends/