World of Warcraft hackers using Sony BMG rootkit

It has come to our attention that World of Warcraft Hackers already are using Sony BMG Music’s Rootkit Software to hide their hacking from Blizzards Warden Client.
We reported earlier this week that some music CDs by Sony BMG labeled “Content enhanced & protected” would bring up an installation program when the music CD was put into a personal computer.

This program once installed could not be uninstalled by normal means. Hackers could use the software to hide their hacking attempts from antivirus tools and the like. Who would have thought that the first available use would be using this for hacking the online game World of Warcraft ?

Blizzards Warden Client checks every 15 seconds if the computer playing Word of Warcraft runs programs or scripts in its background that would illegally help players cheat in the game. Take a look at the related thread to receive more information.

Update: The thread is no longer available and traces of the incident are only found on third party news site and not on the original sites they have been posted on.

It is nevertheless interesting to note that hackers managed to highjack the rootkit for their own purposes, in this case to cheat in the World of Warcraft game. It is likely that it can be used for other purposes as well, for instance to elude detection by convention security software that is not able to detect rootkits on the computer system.

One could now think that it took hackers a long time to manipulate the rootkit software for their own plans. It was in fact incredibly easy: Blizzard’s anti-cheat protection software could not detect files with the modified prefix $sys$. All it took was to add the prefix to the files and make sure the rootkit was up and running on the PC system to bypass Blizzard’s WOW protection.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Thursday November 3, 2005 -
Tags:bmg, rootkits, sony, world-of-warcraft