Multimodal Game Bot Detection using User Behavioral Characteristics

As the online service industry has continued to grow, illegal activities in the online world have drastically increased and become more diverse. Most illegal activities occur continuously because cyber assets, such as game items and cyber money in online games, can be monetized into real currency. The aim of this study is to detect game bots in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). We observed the behavioral characteristics of game bots and found that they execute repetitive tasks associated with gold farming and real money trading. We propose a game bot detection methodology based on user behavioral characteristics. The methodology of this paper was applied to real data provided by a major MMORPG company. Detection accuracy rate increased to 96.06% on the banned account list.