• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.585-594
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• 2018

Virtual currencies have emerged along with new technologies such as block chain, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data. This study examines the benefits of a security-enhanced block chain resulting from individual trading, decentralized from governments, as well as the problems associated with misuse of virtual currencies. Virtual currencies, due to its anonymity, is vulnerable to financial crimes, such as ransom-ware, fraud, drug trafficking, tax evasion and money laundering. Use of virtual currencies can facilitate criminals avoid detection from investigative agencies. Government regulatory policy continues to address these concerns, and the virtual currency exchange has also announced a self-regulation proposal. However, a fundamental solution remains necessary. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the problems regarding abuse of virtual currency and to identify a practical system for transactions involving virtual currencies. However, in order to promote transactions involving virtual currencies and to institutionalize a governance system, multilateral cooperation is required. Although the restricting the use of virtual currencies regarding minors and foreign trade, as well as the introduction of a real-name system are considered promising prospects, many problems remain. Virtual currency is not a simple digital item but a method of redesigning the function of money. Coordinated efforts are needed globally to be able to further activate the positive aspects concerning the use of virtual currencies.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.585-600
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• 2012

Security issues in online games are increasing as the online game industry grows. Real money trading (RMT) by online game users has become a security issue in several countries including Korea because RMT is related to criminal activities such as money laundering or tax evasion. RMT-related activities are done by professional work forces, namely gold-farmers, and many of them employ the automated program, bot, to gain cyber asset in a quick and efficient way. Online game companies try to prevent the activities of gold-farmers using game bots detection algorithm and block their accounts or IP addresses. However, game bot detection algorithm can detect a part of gold-farmer's network and IP address blocking also can be detoured easily by using the virtual private server or IP spoofing. In this paper, we propose a method to detect gold-farmer groups by analyzing their connection patterns to the online game servers, particularly information on their routing and source locations. We verified that the proposed method can reveal gold-farmers' group effectively by analyzing real data from the famous MMORPG.