Virtual Worlds (VWs) are immensely popular online environments, where users interact in real-time via digital beings (avatars). However, a number of security issues affect VWs, and they are vulnerable to a range of attacks on their infrastructure and communications channels. Their powerful architecture can also be used to mount attacks against live Real World servers, by using malicious VW objects. Researching these attacks in commercial VWs would not be acceptable, as it would be contrary to the terms of conditions which govern acceptable behaviour in a particular VW. So in this paper, attacks were conducted/analysed in a laboratory-based test bed VW implementation developed specifically for the research, with custom built attack and analysis tools: commercial VWs were used for data gathering only. Results of these experiments are presented, and appropriate countermea-sures proposed which could reduce the likelihood of the attacks succeeding in live VWs.
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