Being a professional gamer is the desire of many young players, especially when they hear that the money involved can be serious, with league jackpots easily peaking at $5m USD as is the case with the upcoming LoL championships, but some people are not content on playing fair and square and earning their keep in legitimate ways. The latter way of making money is how a 21-year old hacker known as Shane ‘Jason’ Duffy rapidly built up his bank balance.
Earning $1000 per day, Duffy exploited a security breach that he found on an employee account of Riot Games, where the employee had not updated and changed their password as requested when a breach was originally discovered. This flaw though lead Duffy to a hackers gold mine – access to an estimated 24.5 million user accounts of LoL players around the world. On top of this he also had access to League of Legends: Supremacy, which he leaked out on to the public net shortly after.
Following the leak of Supremacy he was arrested and his equipment seized in conjunction with the illegal activities. Released on bail, Duffy soon went back to his old ways, offering a service to knock other LoL players out of games in exchange for cash along with the selling of character skins, which in itself made him $200-800 a time.
All of this activity led Duffy to have a massive bank balance, with over 880 transactions being accrued in one month, earning him well over $1000 a day. This second round of hacking soon brought him another meeting with the police, with another round of equipment getting seized, along with $110,000 worth of Bitcoins.
All of this illegal activity has come to bite him back as he now awaits sentencing in a Queensland court for nine separate charges of illegal activity, five of those for fraud with the others including a charge of hacking the Riot Games servers.
To put of this into context; if you want to earn a tidy living through online gaming, you’re better off in joining a gaming clan or team – this will bring you both money and fame in a legal way.
Source: Tweaktown
The flip side of the story is that when you are told to update your passwords because of a security floor being exposed, do so. All this could have been avoided.