BMST Co. Ltd.

Business Overview

Following the commercial launch of its first office applications software WPS 1.0 in 1989, Kingsoft Corporation Limited has now become a leading entertainment and applications software developer, distributor and service provider in China. The Company leverages its comprehensive software development platform to offer a wide range of innovative entertainment and applications software. In October, 2007, Kingsoft was successfully listed on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited.

Kingsoft has several well-known products such as WPS Office, Kingsoft PowerWord, Kingsoft Internet Security, and online games such as the JX Series and The First Myth. In addition, the company sells various products such as Kingsoft Internet Security and Kingsoft PowerWord to retail consumers, corporate organizations and government agencies in China using online and offline distribution channels. Online games are one of the main product lines of Kingsoft. Thousands of game servers are deployed distributed in Internet Data Centers (IDCs) in more than twenty provinces in China.

Challenge

There is no doubt that virtual money and asset are vital for thousands of millions of game players worldwide.  They cost gamers hundreds of hours and much real money (believe it or not, some gamers spend several million RMB to buy those magic powerful virtual assets!).  From IT perspective, those precious sword, gold coins, revivification medicine, etc. are just digits and numbers in underlying database tables. However, they are equal to real money.

These virtual money and asset are attractive to external hackers and internal staff at the same time. Failure of protection of those virtual money and assets will potentially incur lawsuit and big loss to the company. How to make sure the valuable data are properly protected and handled? How to avoid internal abuse and theft? How to make sure the successful forensics whenever an internal theft or other security incident happened?

Solution

In April 2008, BMST received a call from security team of Kingsoft requesting an “emergency” test drive of Session Auditor. One week after the test drive, they made an order of the product. From then on, more and more Session Auditor products have been deployed into the critical network segments to monitor internal sensitive operations.

Benefits

Their investment has got big return on virtual money and asset protection.

In March 2009, there was a news about a trial on insider criminal related to Kingsoft. The former staff of Kingsoft was accused for helping other two accomplices to tamper and sell the online virtual money that was worth of about 7 millions RMB, among which 3 millions of RMB was traded via Taobao.com (No 1. consumer e-commerce website of China). Finally, the three accused were actually arrested and judged guilty at May 2008.

Through this case, Session Auditor help IT team build up very solid and clear deterrence to internal abuse.