More than 30 MMORPG companies targeted in ongoing malware attack

Researchers have uncovered an ongoing cyberespionage campaign targeting more than 30 online video game companies over the past four years.

The companies infected by the malware primarily market so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing games. They're mostly located in South East Asia, but are also in the US, Germany, Japan, China, Russia, Brazil, Peru, and Belarus, according to a release published Thursday by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. The attackers work from computers with Chinese and Korean language configurations. They used their unauthorized access to obtain digital certificates that were later exploited in malware campaigns targeting other industries and political activists.

So far, there's no evidence that customers of the infected game companies were targeted, although in at least one case, malicious code was accidentally installed on gamers' computers by one of the infected victim companies. Kaspersky said there was another case of end users being infected by the malware, which is known as "Winnti." The company didn't rule out the possibility that players could be hit in the future, potentially as a result of collateral damage.