Monday, January 28, 2008 9:11 AM
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Symantec Security Response Weblog: It’s Not a Wonderful Second Life
It’s Not a Wonderful Second Life
It’s not very far into 2008 and sadly we are already seeing some of our predictions on the security trends of 2008 come true. I blogged earlier that our security analyses expected to see old style cybercrimes turn up in virtual worlds. While it’s not clear if any crime occurred, they did experience an old fashion run on banks. Unfortunately, unlike in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” there was no George Bailey to stop the bank run.
There is a highly developed economy in Second Life and many bank-like businesses virtualized to handle people’s money. Like social networks, virtual worlds create a sense of trust in their users. So when offered interest rates as preposterously high as 40 percent, many Second Lifers didn’t give it a Second Thought (apologies, that pun was unavoidable). To Second Life’s credit they tried to get on top of the problem by announcing on January 8th that they would ban offers of interest on investments unless the bank could offer “proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter.” The end result was that most of these “banks” would end up having to close on January 22nd.
Unfortunately, this caused a run on the banks. And some of them, most notoriously a bank called Ginko, just disappeared with people’s virtual money. What makes this bad is that virtual money in Second Life costs real money and the pain in the pocketbook people felt was not virtual.
The Los Angeles Times covered the story last Tuesday. It’s a good article and while there is no George Bailey, there are mermaids, storm troopers, and a very large rabbit.
Posted by Kevin Haley on January 28, 2008 05:00 AM
Source: Symantec Security Response Weblog: It’s Not a Wonderful Second Life
Filed under: In the News, Internet Hacks, Spam\Phishing, Security