Most have known this for years; and when I see ridiculous lag spikes in a server... it makes me wonder some times.

ARSTECHNICA:

World of Spycraft: NSA, GCHQ hacked WoW and Xbox Live, other games

"Be careful how hard you troll in multiplayer games because the NSA, CIA, and FBI may be listening. According to a briefing paper from the National Security Agency published by The Guardian today, the NSA and its counterpart agency in the United Kingdom made efforts to monitor in-game communications in World of Warcraft, Xbox Live, Second Life, and other games and virtual environments. The FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies also have eyes and ears wandering virtual worlds.

The January 2007 document, provided to The Guardian by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, reveals that the British communications-monitoring agency GCHQ had developed "exploit packages" for Xbox Live and World of Warcraft. NSA analysts proposed selectively targeting exploits for those and other "games and virtual environments" (GVE) based on intelligence that Al Qaeda members and other individuals of interest were using them—potentially to communicate with each other and conduct training.

"Al Qaida terrorist target selectors and GVE executables have been found associated with Xbox Live, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and other GVEs in PINWALE network traffic, TAO databases, and in forensic data," the report stated. "Other targets include Chinese hackers, an Iranian nuclear scientist, Hizballah, and Hamas members." And the games and virtual worlds not only provided a potential way to monitor communications between these individuals but could also provide their geographic location, information on their social networks (through buddy lists), and a potential way to drop malware onto their computers to collect even more data. "It has been well documented that terrorists are OPSEC and tech savvy and are only getting more so over time," the report noted. "These applications and their servers however, are trusted by their users and make a connection to another computer on the Internet, which can then be exploited."

For more info follow the link:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013 ... her-games/

_________________
"Down with democracy... we need more dictatorships"! Galamoth
"Derms, celebrate your independance"! Babz