There are 5.09 Born Every Minute

From MMORPG.com comes the news that Symantec has found a website hosting 44 million stolen gaming credentials. That's some serious phishing.

Symantec says that the accounts are gathered via trojans and keyloggers, and that they have other trojans that validate the accounts.

How likely is it that they've got your account info? Well, Symantec reports that there are 210,000 WoW accounts. However, MMORPG.com reported today that WoW has currently 11.5 million subscribers. So that's about 2 percent, which would make it quite a distinction for your account to be among them.

This goes a long way to unravelling what has been to me a mystery. Most of the phishing/hacking attempts I've seen were pretty unsophisticated. I'm always highly suspicious of free stuff. But then, I've been in computing for, well, almost all of my 3000 years (3 million if you're using EVE time).

But no, it's a sad few that are the prey. However, it's enough to make it worth the pirate's while, small a hit rate as it is. That's the beauty of computers, they can ferret out that little gold nugget from all the sluice in the world, while you sleep.

Since there are about 134 million births per year, we can work this out: