A man who has been making online games for 20 years

Hacker claims that he turned the search and use of the shortcomings of popular MMO video games into a profitable full-time job

Manfred's character stands motionless in the virtual world of the 2014 sci-fi multiplayer game WildStar Online. Manfred, the living person who controls the character, enters commands into the debugger. In just a few seconds, the seemingly simplest hack Manfred’s virtual currency soars to more than 18,000,000,000,000,000 units, or 18 quintillons.

I watch this in a demo video recorded by Manfred, standing next to him in a Las Vegas bar on Thursday. Manfred, who asked me not to call his real name, said that he had been involved in hacking several video games for 20 years, and earned real money on hacking, similar to what I just saw. His course of action is slightly different from the game for the game, but, in fact, consists of deceptive actions, forcing the game to give him objects or currency in excess. He sells these items or currency to other players for real money or sells wholesale in the gray markets of online games, for example, the Internet Game Exchange, which then sells these virtual things to the players.

At current rates, Manfred assumes he has $ 397 million worth of gold from WildStar. This is a huge number, but its income is limited only by the capacity of the real market for the in-game currency.
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When I spoke with Manfred before his report at the Def Con hacker conference, he said that he wanted to go there, give this demo, and leave “like a ghost” so that no one else would see or hear. He said he wants to be “invisible,” as in the last 20 years. He discovered more than a hundred unknown vulnerabilities to the general public in more than 20 online games, and turned the hacking and trading of virtual goods into a full-fledged job.

Unlike most game hackers, Manfred does not use cheats to gain advantage over opponents. He hacks the game because he lives it.

“The best hacks are imperceptible because you change the rules so that nobody understands what is happening,” says Manfred. - When hacking video games, the main goal is to be invisible. You do not need to interfere with the players, you do not need to let the gaming company know about your hacking. You don't even need them to know that what you are doing is generally possible. ”

On Saturday, Manfred came out of the shadows and told his story for the first time during his speech. At first, he wanted to hack WildStar Online in front of an audience, use unknown zero-day vulnerabilities so that his report was not recorded. But the conference organizers told him that all the speeches were necessarily recorded, so he did not do the hacking in person - much to the chagrin of the audience.

Starting with Ultima Online, one of the first massively multiplayer online games, Manfred was looking for ways to crack games to get virtual money or merchandise, which he then sold first on eBay and then in Chinese online markets.

Manfred, who refused to tell you how much money he earned in his career, says that he didn’t cheat to defeat other players. He considers himself a service provider: he offered in-game purchases before they even appeared.

“I don’t like to call them 'hacks,'” Manfred told me, laughing. - It is more like searching for unintended features in the protocol.

First hack

It all started in 1997, when he played Ultima Online. At that time, he went online via dial -up, which is why he was constantly killed by players with the best Internet connection. To compensate for failures, he found ways to trick the game.

Once out of boredom, he discovered a mistake that was destined to change his life. Ultima Online had a limited set of houses that can be created in the game, so this resource was rare. Manfred says he found a way to remove the homes of other players and gain control over their territory, which allowed him to build more houses than is usually allowed.

Once he had the idea to put a castle from Ultima Online on eBay and see if someone would buy it. As a result, he sold it for almost $ 2,000 (he says that since then he has sold almost 100 homes at an average price of $ 2,000).

"Yes, it's real money! - remembers his thought Manfred. “They helped me pay for college.” I've sold houses and locks from Ultima Online for three or four years in a row. "


Manfred's character (in purple clothes) after stealing a house

But Ultima Online was just the beginning. Manfred claims that over the past twenty years, he has found ways to hack and make money in several games: Lineage 2, Shadowbane, Final Fantasy XI, Dark Age of Camelot, Lord of the Rings Online, RIFT, Age of Conan, Star Wars New Republic, Guild Wars 2, and others.

“I was a wholesale supplier for most of these games,” says Manfred.

For example, in the game Dark Age of Camelot, Manfred discovered a vulnerability that allowed him to go out and re-enter the game so that the game did not notice this, with the result that he could clone his character and valuable things contained in it.

“I could create as much money as I wanted. It was imperceptible to other players and the company that created the game, says Manfred. “It was a 12-year source of profit.”

Most of the time, his hacks went unnoticed. One exception was Shadowbane. This game, he said, was so easy to hack - hackers could send any data to the game servers, and the game believed them - that the chaos created by them and other players was described in Wired magazine in 2003.

“This was my last malicious hack,” said Manfred. “Then I went underground and did everything so that my hacks go unnoticed.”

Manfred says he may be the only person earning burglary games for so long. But there are many other hacking people to fool the game and win. There are probably others who do it for money, since some of the vulnerabilities it found are easy enough to find a hacker with strong motivation.

Now it’s “Wild West,” he says. "You can make a lot of money, and a lot of people do it every day."

And not just lone hackers. In 2011, a group of hackers in South Korea was arrested and charged with working on video game hacks and making money for the North Korean government. South Korean police reported that the hacker team earned $ 6 million in two years.

Getting out of the shadow for the common good

For Manfred, the current way out of the shadow is a chance to show the world that video games need to take security more seriously. Most of the hacks he made in 20 years, he said, were based on very similar mistakes.

“This is all such a groundhog day, you play a game, you find vulnerabilities, you are banned, you switch to another game,” said Manfred during the report.

Manfred says he has now finished breaking into a video game. Last year, he stopped doing this and got a job at a consulting firm.

“It was a good time,” he told me. But he did away with this because the video game business model has changed. Since now many companies earn money on in-game purchases, he does not consider it fair to compete with their economic strategy.

“I was uncomfortable doing what I was doing,” he says.

Hacking WildStar Online live was to be the latest video game hack for Manfred. But he decided not to. After the report, Manfred told me that he would report the vulnerability to NCSOFT - the company that made WildStar Online - and help fix it.

Perhaps the video game hacking is similar to the Wild West, but now Manfred is sending his horse into the sunset.