I was standing at the bar in a Second Life bordello sipping on a virtual beer, when she suddenly appeared in the doorway. She was tall, she was blond and she was dressed to kill. She had curves in places, where most avatars don’t even have pixels.

She walked up to me, bold as brass, and looked me straight in the eye.

“Hey big boy”, she said, “is that a life-size model of the Empire State’s building in your pocket or are you pleased to see me?”

“I don’t think, I’ve had the pleasure,” I countered, “but I’d sure like to. What’s your name?”

“Gina Ferrari”, she replied, “I’m built for speed and I know exactly when to put the pedal to the metal.”

I cut to the chase, with one of my best lines:

“If I said you had a beautiful API, would you hold it against me?” I wispered in her ear.

It wasn’t long before we were flying back to my penthouse suite across the bay and pulling each other’s clothes off. I reached for my Sex Gen bed and, well… Where the hell was my Sex Gen bed? It was nowhere to be found. There I was, bare naked, hot to trot and impotent.

Love And Theft In The Virtual Worlds

As far as I can tell, the only thing real in a virtual world is money. And where there’s money, there are traders, scam artists and thieves - and they are real too. That was one of the cybercrime trends that Eugene Kaspersky drew our attention to at the Kaspersky Labs Moscow conference.

Right now there’s a legal case in progress surrounding the Sex Gen bed. If you’ve not read about it, then all you need to know is that the Sex Gen bed allows avatars to simulate sex in over 100 positions, and hence a good many second lifers have spent thousands of their Linden Dollars on it. Stroker Serpentine of Strokerz Toys (aka Kevin Alderman) is suing Volkov Catteneo (identity yet to be revealed), whom he alleges has stolen his Sex Gen bed design. Second Life artifacts are actually programs and hence the case is being fought on the basis of IP and copyright law.

Inhabitants of virtual worlds have virtual possessions and virtual identities and these things are not acquired for free. In fact it can take many months of playing an on-line game like World of Warcraft, at up to $15 per month (prices vary according to geography), to accumulate a reasonable amount of virtual gold and “experience”. Consequently, there are organized groups of players, mostly in China, that build up stores of these things and will sell them to you. And that has, of course, led to large quantities of real world spam targeting game players, aimed at selling such things.

It’s an industry. So hackers are distributing keylogger Trojans and using them to gain access to user accounts in virtual worlds in order to steal virtual possessions and even whole virtual identities. One recent example was the theft of 4000 euros worth of virtual furniture from the Habbo Hotel (yet another virtual world) allegedly carried out by six Dutch teenagers.

A particular attraction that virtual world theft has for hackers is that the police forces of the world (for the moment at least) are less likely to spend time on this kind of Internet theft. And yet there is a very real financial market for the stolen goods.

If you are a denizen of a virtual world, you still cannot escape the need for real world PC security.

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