Teen makes thousands of dollars hacking an online game
Apr 21, 2015 11:52:45 GMT -5
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Post by Morreion on Apr 21, 2015 11:52:45 GMT -5
How a Silicon Valley teen made thousands of dollars hacking a wildly popular online game (Business Insider)
...MapleStory presents rare opportunities for hackers with even a cursory knowledge of coding, like Liu. The game is huge and free-to-play, with over 35 million user-created characters, and, as a consequence, constitutes a huge market for cheap items. While you can’t sell items for real money in the game, third party services like Paypal provide an easy loophole. For-profit hacking is present in almost every massive multiplayer online game, but some hackers and programmers say MapleStory is remarkably easy to hack due to its “gaping vulnerabilities.”
Eos Parish is a programmer who owns southperry.net, a website that analyzes developments in MapleStory. He said that hackers are “subtly poisoning” the game, though the fault lies on the end of the publisher Nexon and game designer Wizet.
“Maple has by far the worst abuse I have seen,” he wrote in an email. “The combination of its popularity and openness and the severity of its design flaws made it a perfect storm for exploitation for profit.”
It’s hard to quantify just how harmful and prevalent these hacking networks are. Nexon has taken legal action against specific, particularly sophisticated hackers, but thousands and thousands of players use simple hacks on a daily basis. In MapleStory, mass duplication of the kind done by Liu and his friends is less common, and almost always leads to extreme deflation since the supply of goods becomes artificially inflated.
But, even more importantly, some of Liu’s hacks require crashing the game, which could constitute a denial of service attack, a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. By this standard, even lesser, more common hacking could be considered potential fraud.
Parish doesn’t believe Nexon, which only gave a short statement for this story, will prosecute Liu or hackers of his ilk. “It makes more sense for them to target the suppliers than the users,” he wrote. “It'd be too time-consuming and expensive to bother targeting a hacker here or there while hundreds more are waiting to take their place.”
I asked Liu if he feared prosecution. He dismissed it, saying that he wasn’t doing anything illegal.
That’s assuming Nexon never goes after the mid-level hackers. If the company decided to take another tack, Parish said that it is “entirely possible for Nexon to go for 'low hanging fruit' if they see a highly visible, recognizable and easily prosecutable hacker ... to instill fear into the masses.”
...MapleStory presents rare opportunities for hackers with even a cursory knowledge of coding, like Liu. The game is huge and free-to-play, with over 35 million user-created characters, and, as a consequence, constitutes a huge market for cheap items. While you can’t sell items for real money in the game, third party services like Paypal provide an easy loophole. For-profit hacking is present in almost every massive multiplayer online game, but some hackers and programmers say MapleStory is remarkably easy to hack due to its “gaping vulnerabilities.”
Eos Parish is a programmer who owns southperry.net, a website that analyzes developments in MapleStory. He said that hackers are “subtly poisoning” the game, though the fault lies on the end of the publisher Nexon and game designer Wizet.
“Maple has by far the worst abuse I have seen,” he wrote in an email. “The combination of its popularity and openness and the severity of its design flaws made it a perfect storm for exploitation for profit.”
It’s hard to quantify just how harmful and prevalent these hacking networks are. Nexon has taken legal action against specific, particularly sophisticated hackers, but thousands and thousands of players use simple hacks on a daily basis. In MapleStory, mass duplication of the kind done by Liu and his friends is less common, and almost always leads to extreme deflation since the supply of goods becomes artificially inflated.
But, even more importantly, some of Liu’s hacks require crashing the game, which could constitute a denial of service attack, a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. By this standard, even lesser, more common hacking could be considered potential fraud.
Parish doesn’t believe Nexon, which only gave a short statement for this story, will prosecute Liu or hackers of his ilk. “It makes more sense for them to target the suppliers than the users,” he wrote. “It'd be too time-consuming and expensive to bother targeting a hacker here or there while hundreds more are waiting to take their place.”
I asked Liu if he feared prosecution. He dismissed it, saying that he wasn’t doing anything illegal.
That’s assuming Nexon never goes after the mid-level hackers. If the company decided to take another tack, Parish said that it is “entirely possible for Nexon to go for 'low hanging fruit' if they see a highly visible, recognizable and easily prosecutable hacker ... to instill fear into the masses.”
