What can your bank learn from World of Warcraft?

Multiplayer online games have become a big business not only for gaming companies. There are “underground” markets in which people spend very real money to purchase virtual items that can give them an advantage in their favorite online game. And this is despite the fact that in many multiplayer games to engage in such activities is strictly prohibited by the rules. But the main problem is not that. After all, where real money is exchanged, more frequent real-life thefts and fraud often occur.

But why do people exchange their hard-earned, honestly earned money for virtual goods that they cannot possess outside the game? The fact is that in multiplayer online games, to get the most powerful character and thereby get to more interesting in-game content, you have to spend a lot of time to “pump” your Alter-ego level, develop his skills and get access to the best virtual things.

Naturally, not everyone can spend free time “pumping” the character. The so-called “Golden Farmers” are known mostly for the abominable habit of loudly advertising their services by far from the most honest methods and many newcomers use their services, pay them real money without even realizing that they are doing something against the rules. Many of these “farmers” are currently people from developing countries who “work” all day long, playing online games and earning virtual currency and items that they later sell to ordinary players for ordinary money. You can even buy ready-made "pumped" characters who have a high level right away, so you do not have to spend time to do it yourself.


Naturally, people who received “gold” immediately began to appear, objects and characters in the development of which were invested for many months, simply stealing them, and then selling it all to other players. Game accounts are often cracked in the most popular multiplayer games, such as World of Warcraft, in connection with which the creators of the game, Blizzard, even created a special portal to teach players how to protect themselves from this scourge.
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One way to protect your WoW account is the Authenticator. You can purchase it as a special key fob or download a mobile version for many models of phones and communicators. The security problem has become so serious that Blizzard stopped paying for the delivery of these devices.


Once you have received your authenticator, you log in to Battle.net (the main account server for all Blizzard games), and ask to associate a keychain or mobile application with your account. You will be asked to use the authenticator to generate a special code (by simply pressing a button) and enter this code in the form on the website. From now on, you will be able to log in to your game account by entering a password and generating a code using a personal authenticator. Each time this code is different, so spyware (keyloggers) that can "steal" your password against this code will be powerless.


Looking at this level of security, which is used to protect virtual items and the difficult work of “pumping” a character, one involuntarily wonders why such an equally valuable thing as real bank accounts are not protected in this way? Why aren't any similar solutions being used to add an extra level of security when accessing online personal bank account management systems, for example? Or something that could save credit card or bank account information for easy access (like PayPal).

It is unlikely that someone would want to wear a huge bunch of authenticator trinkets. If someone took this idea as a basis and launched a service that would allow organizations to set up a system for accessing their sites using one authenticator (say, it would be one key fob for accessing online banking, PayPal, accounts on the Internet shops, game accounts), then the loss of an account in such systems would be less.


Of course, this idea carries with it new problems, for the solution of which it is necessary to contact technical support and some more serious ones, such as the loss of the authenticator. But it’s not quite right to agree that to protect an account in an online game, more serious and at the same time simpler security measures are used for users than for bank accounts in your bank.

A source