Oh noooo! One day you're a level 70 dwarf gallivanting through the forest, whacking away at foul beasties with your +11 sword of the Holy Relic, flying around with your winged mount, and the next day you find yourself naked, all your valuables gone and your flying mount missing. Welcome to the wonderful world of World of Warcraft hacking!

Note: Okay, so there is probably no +11 sword of the Holy Relic, but I do know I like the word gallivanting.

From the article:

For months, hackers--most likely in China and Russia, according to security watchers--have been surreptitiously installing keylogging software on WoW players' Windows computers, hijacking their accounts and selling off their often valuable in-game assets.

And the problem doesn't show any signs of going away.

The gangs perpetrating the hacking are "incredibly active, and it's a good exploit," said Roger Thompson, CTO of security software developer LinkScanner. "It's probably a conservative estimate to say that there's tens of thousands of victims."

The exploit works when unsuspecting WoW players visit any number of Web sites infected by the hackers with keylogging software. When the players visit the sites--which are often unrelated to WoW, but that players frequent, Thompson said--the software is quietly installed on their computers, allowing the hackers to spy on keystrokes and steal players' WoW passwords.

Read the full article over at news.com.com