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