We've all heard the old adage, "cheaters never prosper." But maybe cheaters can affect the prosperity of online worlds, too.

A new book just out this week, "Exploiting Online Games," plans to address this very issue. It's written by security researcher and Cigital CTO Gary McGraw and his colleague Greg Holgund, who look at the ways online games (which, following the client/server model, store data like avatar locations on a server in realtime) might be vulnerable to malicious types who could manipulate the world, or users' investments therein.

The gaming market's expected to reach $12 billion in annual revenue by 2009, and with most virtual worlds now creating their own in-world economies founded in real user dollars, online game developers have got a lot on the line. "These software companies are installing spyware to make sure gamers aren't cheating," McGraw told Information Week-- adding that World of Warcraft has a similar tool in place called The Warden.

McGraw and his colleagues created a piece of software in response called The Governor, in order to suss The Warden out. McGraw found that The Warden also reports on gamers' computer data not necessarily related to WoW-- like what version of Windows the player uses, and even what they're writing in their IMs.

The idea of a virtual economy-- now, for all intents and purposes, a reality-- opens up the same crime opportunities that a real one does, from money-laundering to fraudulent investments, but it seems McGraw's book is mainly concerned with the farther-reaching implications for enterprise defense of distributed software. "If you think about the kinds of security issues tied in with MMORPGs, they're an indicator of things to come as we adopt SOA [Service-Oriented Architecture]," he said.

[Via InformationWeek]