A person who has earned hacking online games for 20 years

Original author: Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
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The hacker claims that he turned the search and use of the shortcomings of popular MMO video games into a profitable full-time job


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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, injects commands into the debugger. In a few seconds, the seemingly simplest hack, the amount of Manfred’s virtual currency takes off to more than 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 units, or 18 quintillion.

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 give his real name, says that he has been hacking several video games for 20 years and is making real money from hacks like the one I saw now. His course of action is slightly different from game to game, but, in fact, consists of fraudulent actions, forcing the game to give him items or currency in excess. He sells these items or currencies to other players for real money or sells wholesale in the gray markets of online games, for example, Internet Game Exchange, which then sell these virtual things to players.

At the current exchange rate, Manfred suggests 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 in-game currency.

When I talked 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 could see or hear him. He said he wants to be “invisible,” as in the past 20 years. He discovered more than a hundred vulnerabilities unknown to the general public in more than 20 online games, and turned hacking and trading in virtual goods into a full-fledged job.

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

“The best hacks are inconspicuous because you change the rules so that no one 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 the game company to know about your hack. You don’t even need them to know that what you are doing is even possible. ”

On Saturday, Manfred stepped out of the shadows and told his story for the first time during his speech. First, he wanted to hack WildStar Online in front of the audience, use unknown zero-day vulnerabilities so that his report was not recorded. But the conference organizers told him that all the performances must be recorded, so he did not do the hack live - much to the audience’s chagrin.

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

Manfred, refusing to tell how much money he earned during his career, says he did not 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. “This is more like looking for unintended features in a protocol.”

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First hack


It all started in 1997 when he played Ultima Online. At that time, he went on the Internet via dialup , because of which he was constantly killed by players with the best Internet connection. To compensate for the failures, he found ways to cheat 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 you can create in the game, so this resource was rare. Manfred says he discovered a way to remove other players' homes and gain control of their territory, which allowed him to build more houses than was normally allowed.

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

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

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

But Ultima Online was only the beginning. Manfred claims to have found ways to hack and make money on several games over the past twenty years: 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 exit and re-enter the game so that the game did not notice this, as a result of which he could clone his character and the valuables he contained.

“I could create as much money as I wanted. It was invisible 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 him and other players was described in the Wired magazine in 2003.

“That was my last malicious hack,” Manfred said. “Then I went underground and did everything so that my break-ins would go unnoticed.”

Manfred says he's probably the only person who has been hacking games for so long. But there are many other hackers to trick the game and win. There are probably others who do this for money, since some of the vulnerabilities he found are easy enough to find for a highly motivated hacker.

This is now the Wild West, he says. “You can make a lot of money, and many people do it every day.”

And not just lone hackers. In 2011, a group of hackers were arrested in South Korea and charged with hacking video games and making money for the North Korean government. South Korean police said the hacker team earned $ 6 million in two years.

Out of the Shadow for the Common Good


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

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

Manfred says he has now finished hacking video games. 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 it, as the video game business model has changed. Since many companies now make money on in-game purchases, he does not consider it fair to compete with their economic strategy.

“It became inconvenient for me to do what I was doing,” he says.

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

Hacking video games may look like the Wild West, but now Manfred is stepping his horse into the sunset.

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