Sure, they're trying to sell the game industry stuff, and nothing sells like a little old
fashioned fear, uncertainty and doubt, but they've got a point: "In 2004, game security became a truly serious problem
for the computer games industry. Virtually every major game, including Halo 2, World of Warcraft and Half-Life 2 had a
major cheating or piracy incident."
Here, courtesy of game middleware provider IT GlobalSecure, Inc., is a chronology of game hacking in the 21st century.
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2001 - Cryptologic's software was hacked and lost $1.9M in a day
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2001 - McDonald's Monopoly sweepstakes scandal
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2003 - Half-Life 2 code theft
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2003 - China's online gaming market admits $12,000 lost each day ~ 4% of revenues
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2003 - Battle.net boots over 500,000 accounts (out of 10 M)
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2003 - Everquest removes hundreds for cheating
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2004 - ASF Texas Hold'em hacked
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2004 - SOCOM Online Play hacked
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2004 - Code theft for Halo 2
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2004 - Code theft for Grand Theft Auto—San Andreas
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2004 - Blizzard wins suit against BnetD (competitive open source game server)
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2004 - Nintendo clamps down on piracy
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2004 - Blizzard's Battle.net boots 500,000+ accounts from Starcraft and tens of thousands from Warcraft III
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2004 - Online Poker-bot problems
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2004 - Valve boots 50,000+ players within 3 months of releasing Half-Life 2
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2004 - X-Box modder crackdown
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2004 - World of Warcraft has major timing hack within 3 weeks of release
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2005 - Sims 2 hacked
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2005 - Halo 2 service boots several thousand users for cheating @ $50/subscriber/year
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2005 - America's Army hacked
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2005 - NCSoft adds security measures to Lineage 2
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2005 - Tecmo sues Game Hackers
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2005 - Final Fantasy XI bans 800 for griefing
The implication is that their products could have prevented all this, but color us skeptical. Never underestimate the ingenuity of bored high school students. Remember the whole incident with the felt-tipped markers and copy protection?
