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The Trojan horse, LegMir-Y, targets players of Lineage, an online fantasy game of witchcraft and war, by harvesting usernames, passwords and other data from players.

The Trojan substitutes Windows files with copies of itself and edits the Registry to ensure it is run each time the computer is started. It also tries to turn off any programs it sees running that it thinks may be security related. If successful this would leave the infected computer open to future attacks.

'It is more and more common for the analysts in our virus lab to discover that, as well as causing disruption, a piece of new malware is designed to steal registration keys, passwords and data from players of computer games,' said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. 'It's sad to think that people will be so desperate to do better in a virtual world that they're actually prepared to commit a real crime. We expect to see more Internet skirmishes between rival online gamers and malicious code to assist this kind of Internet robbery in the future.'