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Hackers who use keystroke captures and botnets to prey on other, less adept computer users are pretty low in my book….how much lower are they then when their preferred targets are still in grade school?

A scam to convince users of the popular family-safe web community Neopets to run a keystroke capture program and thus compromise their PC and all information on it has recently been brought to my attention by Christopher Boyd at SpywareGuide. Now this is not technically on topic here at MobilitySite, but there are enough regular readers out there with kids on the net that I felt it was a worthwhile thing to bring up.

Read on after the jump to learn more…

For those of you who are unaware, Neopets is the granddaddy of family-safe virtual communities, with an enormous account base which includes plenty of parents and grownups but is mainly made up of the juicebox set. The site lets you create a virtual pet, outfit him/her with virtual stuff and play lots of free games while chatting in “safe” areas.

As always in such worlds, rare items rule and players will do a lot to try and find them. No items in Neopets are rarer, more expensive or more sought after then paintbrushes used to change the color or appearence of your pet. The hackers take advantage of this and post notices on third party fan websites and send emails and IMs within Neopets itself announcing that they have a program that allows you to create your OWN paintbrush if you just download it and run it on your computer…the results are pretty predictable after that.

From there, it’s just a case of said child visiting the external link, downloading a file and being keylogged into infinity and beyond. Then the fun really begins.

Wave goodbye to your rare items, kids – and you didn’t want your XBox Live account (that potentially has credit card details attached to it) anymore either, did you? The attackers then use the familiar tactic of taking a previously trusted source and using it to attack their friends & other newcomers to the site. Alongside hanging out in the handily labeled “Newbies” section and spamming messages, they’ll also post fake “It worked” messages from compromised accounts to the forums of threads started by the attacker, much like people do on Youtube to give the impression that fake programs actually work (scroll down to “positive comments”).

If you play on Neopets or have a family member who does so, be very wary of this scam. If you have a child on Neopets, it may be worthwhile to tell them about what the hackers are doing and remind them to NEVER run a program downloaded from an unknown source like that. If you are not sure your wise advice will be heeded (for example, such a talk would cause my 10 year old to want to run such a program anyway just to see what happens) remember that Vista has parental controls that requires a password to download, run or install any new software. When in doubt, use them…I do on my son’s laptop. I think XP has similar features, but if not, lots of third party software will do the same.

Remember, the best way to stay safe in the digital jungle is to be proactive and careful….and remember that you never get something for nothing. Otherwise, it’s just like taking candy from a baby.

Read the whole alert HERE.

Zealot (444 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).