Cyber-criminals Targeting Online Gaming Websites

adeelarshad82 writes "According to a June 2010 Nielsen NetView survey on Internet usage, online gaming has overtaken e-mail in terms of the total percentage of time Americans spend online. Only social networking scores higher. On average, online gaming now consumes a staggering 407 million hours of U.S. citizens' time per year. Unfortunately, Nielsen's not the only one that noticed this trend; cybercriminals have taken note as well and are taking advantage of this by infecting games sites—from legitimate forums and tutorial sites to shadier download sites—to attack the unwary. Fortunately though, Avast has published a list of worst gaming sites."

The list

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, here is the list of the worst offenders:

  Gamesfactoryinteractive.com

  Games-digest.com

  Mariogamesplay.com

  Anywhere-games.com

  Galacticflashgames.com

  Towerofdefense.com - hmm, this is one of the favourites of my kids...

So how do I set up my kid's netbooks (Firefox on WinXP) to not go there, for all accounts?

Re:Another security article boils down to one thin

[shoehornjob]

Honestly I'm beginning to think I'm better off with a hardened router with no upnp enabled and rules for traffic on certain ports. a good firewall is a convenient way to track what programs are going in/out but the AV sucks up too many cpu cycles.

Re:407e6

[Nadaka]

That number has to be off by a lot. There are what? 8 million WoW players? If WoW was the only game in the US, each WoW player would only be playing 51 hours a year? I've known people who logged that much time every week in that game and even my friend with 2 kids gets at least 8 hours of WoW a week.