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."

Re:The list

[Stavr0]

C:\WINDOWS\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS
0.0.0.0 Gamesfactoryinteractive.com
0.0.0.0 Games-digest.com
0.0.0.0 Mariogamesplay.com
0.0.0.0 Anywhere-games.com
0.0.0.0 Galacticflashgames.com
0.0.0.0 Towerofdefense.com

Re:The list

[killmenow]

Start->Run->"notepad c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"

Go to new blank line and copy/paste:

127.0.0.1 gamesfactoryinteractive.com
127.0.0.1 games-digest.com
127.0.0.1 mariogamesplay.com
127.0.0.1 anywhere-games.com
127.0.0.1 galacticflashgames.com
127.0.0.1 towerofdefence.com

(Save the file)

Profit.

Re:The list

[Abstrackt]

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS
0.0.0.0 Gamesfactoryinteractive.com
0.0.0.0 Games-digest.com
0.0.0.0 Mariogamesplay.com
0.0.0.0 Anywhere-games.com
0.0.0.0 Galacticflashgames.com
0.0.0.0 Towerofdefense.com

FTFY.

Re:The list

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to reboot windows for host file changes to take affect, at least I have never needed to on Windows 2000, XP, Vista or 7....

You might have to close your web browser, in rare cases an ipconfig /flushdns but reboot isn't needed.

Sites powered by Google Ads

[Animats]

Looking at the list of "evil sites":

• Gamesfactoryinteractive.com - not in DNS, not in Whois. The article probably has the domain wrong.
• Games-digest.com - domain registered in Korea.
• Mariogamesplay.com - has Google ads
• Anywhere-games.com - has Google ads
• Galacticflashgames.com - On Google's "This site may harm your computer" list, yet it contains Google ads.
• Towerofdefense.com - hosted by HostGator

I ran them all through SiteTruth [sitetruth.com], which, unsurprisingly, can't find a legit business behind any of them and thus down-rates them as junk sites.

My solution

[Weaselmancer]

If you need some decently secure web browsing, boot a Knoppix CD. By default it doesn't even mount your hard drives. And all changes to the ram side of the unionfs filesystem expire with a reboot.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion