Launched by an Icelandic gaming company, CCP Games, EVE Online is a persistent world, massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) renowned for its scale and complexity with regard to player interactions. Players engage in unscripted economic competition, warfare, and political schemes, which often include free transactions of in-game assets. The in-game economy highly resembles that of the real world and thus, poses risk for fraud similar to the real world.
Malicious players exploit EVE Online through three main platform abuses or fraudulent activities which include:
- Bot Farming: Using automated bots to accelerate completion of game missions and objectives in order to generate game currency and assets to be re-sold on real-world trading platforms on the surface and/or dark web.
- Real-Money Trade: Hacking user accounts to acquire game currency and assets to re-sell on real-world trading platforms on the surface web and/or dark web.
- Money Laundering: Using stolen credit card credentials to buy in-game assets on real-world trading platforms on the surface web and/or dark web, only to re-sell the assets to obtain “clean” money.
The CCP Games Security Team is tasked with addressing these fraudulent activities and ensuring integrity of the game. However, the process of manually monitoring and cross-referencing user activities is extremely tedious and time-consuming.
To make their work easier, CCP Games deployed Maltego to become the core tool they use to detect and identify in-game fraud.
Without Maltego, it would take much longer to conduct investigations, and the chances of following the wrong leads would increase drastically. Essentially, Maltego displays only what is relevant. Instead of stifling through mountains of data, the data relationships are painted on the Maltego graph. With the time saved, we can investigate deeper into the assets and currency laundering before the assets actually land in the players’ wallets.
Maksym Gryshchenko 🔗︎
CCP Games Security Team 🔗︎
Download this case study now to learn how CCP Games uses Maltego to help suspend more than 90,000 malicious user accounts and make their games safer.
