Compromise of gaming servers

A report yesterday suggested that a hacked server used by employees at Novell, Inc. was employed to scan large numbers of machines worldwide.

Of course, Novell is not the first company to fall victim to hackers, nor will it be the last: it’s just the latest in a long line over recent years.

It seems that the hacked server ran a mail server for a gaming site called ‘Neticus.com’. The main web page for the game was hosted on a separate server, also belonging to Novell. Novell insists that the machine conducting the scans and the game web site lay outside the corporate firewalls.

We live in a world where online games are increasingly being subverted to distribute malicious code, as previously reported on viruslist.com. So the compromise of servers belonging to a major software vendor is of great concern.