earticle

영어

The primary purpose of this research is to find out what types of issues and risks from the policing perspective can be defined through an exploratory study on illegal acquisition and trading of online game items in MMORPG. To achieve this main goal, the researcher first reviewed literatures, articles, security reports, newspapers, and Internet resources relating to the subject of this study for triangulation of exploratory data. MMORPGs feature living economies in that game items and virtual currency--cyber money--have to be gained through gamers' play and have definite value for players. Such a virtual economy can have an impact on the economies of the real world. With hundreds of thousands of interacting users, today's MMORPGs can be an easy and atractive target to hackers, game-item hunters, and cyber-criminals. This study thus tried to focus on identifying why and how both gamers and hackers cheat techniques for breaking online game security to acquire game items and cyber money, and took a close look at security issues and common risks associated with rule-breakers and illegal game item transactions, and its trading process as well. The researcher also classified types of attack techniques and exploits, including game hacks and malicious codes, and studied a variety of ways of illegally acquiring game items. The research results reveals that four issues can affect the current policing activities related to addressing issues, such as game item factory, illegal transactions in foreign currencies by game-item traders, hacks/attacks and cheats, and auto-bots. This study thus concludes that international cooperation is the core key to succeed in fighting against cybercrime and that this research can contribute to suggesting policy implications.

한국어

최근 국내 온라인 게임 시장의 급격한 성장과 더불어 개인정보 유출, 명의·계정의 도용, 게임 아이템 현금거래 및 불법취득 등과 관련한 문제들로 심각한 사회적 부작용뿐만 아니라 각종 범죄행위로 연계되어 국가 경제와 원활한 치안서비스 제공에 부정적 영향을 초래하고 있는 상황이다. 이 논문에서는 게임 아이템 불법취득에 활용되고 있는 수법(Modus Operandi: M.O.)에 대한 실체적인 분석과 함께 형사사법적·Policing 관점에서의 위험성을 고찰하여 정책적 제언과 대응방향을 제시하고자 하였다.