Cyber crime

E.learning Age, May 2008 by Grundy, David

Are we living a life of virtual worlds, virtual crimes but with real consequences?

The virtual world of second Life seems to well reflect the real world at times. As I sit reading about my bank which has managed to lose a couple of disks with 370,000 people's details on, I am also reading reports from the Australian Institute of Criminology that in September 2006 the second Life main database was allegedly hacked with almost 650,000 players, details taken. Life it seems, second or otherwise, is full of little surprises (I watch my credit card bill with great care and interest these days...).

Fun versus security

Virtual worlds offer great opportunities to educators, an immersive environment in which students can explore and collaborate; unfortunately they also contain all of the issues that we know all too well in the physical world. That's not to say we should ignore these opportunities, indeed, at Newcastle Business School at Northumbria University our students are currently engaged in a live project with a local charity, the Tyneside Cynerians, in which they are assessing the possibility of using second Life as a money raising tool for them. A virtual soup kitchen, a Great North Run in cyberspace and more, the students have come up with some truly imaginative ideas.

However, in a virtual world where you have the exchange of fantasy "play" money for solid hard currency, a world where players are capable, like Chinese entrepreneur Anshe Chung, of quite literally becoming real world millionaires from virtual money, it shouldn't be a revelation that a criminal element also exists. As a researcher in the area of virtual assets I sit on a curious fence. On the one hand I'm trying to encourage the educational use of virtual worlds at my university.

On the other hand I'm also lead co-author of virtual security blog, Metasecurity.net, upon which I come across stories of financial scams, virtual paedophilia and more on a daily basis. While promoting the academic use of these virtual environments, I'm also very well aware of the potential dangers they present.

Don't be left out in the cold

It's well known that organised criminal groups and hackers specifically target online game players to steal usernames, passwords, credit card numbers and virtual items from their game accounts. At a recent games conference in Seattle, Microsoft was clear to games developers; "Those of you who are working on massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, organised crime is already looking at you."

Indeed, a friend of mine recently had his online game account compromised by accessing a welltravelled information website, one he'd safely been to many times before, which happened to be "poisoned" with viruses that day. The next time he logged on to his account almost a year's worth of efforts were gone, and his avatar, previously wearing prestigious and hard-to-get clothing, was alone, naked and robbed sitting in the middle of nowhere... presumably shivering in the virtual cold.

Easy targets

Unsurprisingly, for a person who has spent 20-something hours a week, every week, for a year accumulating those virtual items, my friend was quite distraught after a genuine loss for the time and effort which had vanished into the ether. Though of course some may laugh and indeed question the seriousness of this "crime", the fact that someone elsewhere is now probably £500 richer for robbing my friend's account should at the very least highlight the incentives on offer to criminals, with some online game accounts being reported by the BBC to be worth over £5,000.

That is not to say though that the greatest threats to the use of virtual worlds as an educational tool are intrusive criminal elements, quite the opposite. From an instructor's viewpoint it's more the problem of these virtual worlds being filled with other people which is the bigger issue.

A hubbub of criminal activity

Try to think of a virtual world like second Life as a large city, such as London for instance. This city is teeming with activity from multi-national corporations like IBM, Toyota, Microsoft, MTV and so forth, as well as entire areas bought up by bands like Duran Duran, with Concert Island being a very well visited area. Major educational institutions like Harvard, and many UK-based universities have virtual campuses - bright lights, big city... dark shadows. Just as London is filled with all the things a tourist could ever want, it also has places like Soho. And virtual areas filled with inappropriate activities which, despite the best efforts of the games companies' moderators, still go on.

These online worlds can also be unpleasant at times, just like the real world. In the recent Bryon Review Safer Children in a Digital World, Dr Tanya Byron remarks that "Many gamers told me that it is not unusual for them to be exposed to inappropriate language, racist comments, or other verbal abuse when playing online". So while these virtual worlds do offer great opportunities for collaborative work with a possibly worldwide audience, and all the variety of cultural interactions that go along with that, the very nature of sending students into these commercial virtual worlds for educational purposes poses at least as much risk as sending them out into the real world on live projects.