Beware of danger when playing PC games online!!

The Internet is a place where the user can find a lot of information, entertainment or work, but on the other side, the same user can “catch” viruses, spyware or malware. Many people don´t understand why somebody creates these harmful programs (see the notes below about these programs). However, the answer is easy – similarly in the common life we can meet a lot of people with wicked goals. And gaining money through special programs is an appropriate goal of many Internet thieves. There are various methods how to do it. On the Internet the user may visit some Web pages which contain viruses or spyware or malware. It can very often happen to the pages with games because games are considered to be typically connected with gamblers and for this reason it can be a source of money.

But the harmful code may not be only on the Web pages, games themselves can include it. It means that the player, when downloading some game and installing it on the local computer, also installs the harmful code without any suspicion. It can be very dangerous – one small example. Imagine the user installed the game that involves a so-called keylogger. The key logger is a small program that records stealthily all keys which the user presses. Many antivirus programs consider this software as a virus (usually as a Trojan-horse – see A worm, a virus or a Trojan horse?). So, the key logger writes all pressed keys to the txt file and sends it to the thief´s e-mail. Suppose, after that the user visited his online betting on the www.tipsport.cz, where he had to write the text “www.abcd.cz” following by username “honba” and password “dfjni123″. The key logger put this string of characters in the txt file “www.abcd.czdfjni123″. The thief received the file, found this text and was very fast able to connect to the honba-account and transferred all the money from Honba´s Internet account to his (thief´s) own account. It was easy, wasn´t it? Of course, the probability of this coincidence is not very high, but who knows.

Notes:

Malware means malicious software – authors of malware create programs for harming other software. Malware includes PS viruses, trojan-horses, spyware and adware.
Spyware is a program that uses the Internet for sending data from the computer without awareness of a user of the computer. It differs from the backdoor by a content of sending data, i.e. it sends only statistic data (e.g. overview of visiting pages, installed programs) and can be used for advertising. The spyware is typically widespread in shareware programs and the authors of the shareware know about it and conciliate it because they want to earn money.
Adware, or advertising-supported software, is any software that automatically downloads advertisements to a computer. The goal of the adware is to generate revenue for its author. Adware, by itself, is harmless; but some adware may come with integrated spyware such as keyloggers.