In the height of my World of Warcraft career, I was a star druid for the Alliance. I was what you would consider a “hardcore” player: daily raiding for hours upon hours, farming rep and gold for various obscure-but-powerful items, and even hour-long bouts of sitting at the church in Western Plaguelands, just waiting for the raid to assemble while ganking the unaware horde. There was no better resto druid than I.

Alas, after two faithful years, I finally decided to leave the game. As with most other MMOs I’d played, it consumed me: I ate, slept and dreamt WoW. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Luckily, it seems I left at the right time, as WoW players have apparently become the victim of a group of rogue hackers.

BBC reports on the hackers who have managed to find a key vulnerability in Windows that would allow the successful hijacking of a target PC by way of the various animated cursors that may be installed on the OS. By laying a small amount of code on a web site (which is done by hacking popular web sites and leaving the trojan code unbeknownst to the site’s owners) and having the mark view the site, the target computer would inherit the necessary hack.

Once on the mark’s computer, the hack would activate when the system detected the booting of the World of Warcraft EXE. This would then trigger a capture of the user’s login and password information and send it away to the hackers.

The motivation behind such hacking, as explained by the research done by Symantec security, is the fair price that WoW accounts can be sold for—a bounty that proves to be more than even the credit card number itself would go for.

Microsoft released a bug patch to address this issue on April 3, though the vulnerability has been known about for quite some time. They had previously set aside the fix, as they “had seen little evidence of widespread use yet.”