There are no known virus which delivery their payload in this way. It would be monumentally harder to develope, require frequent updating of the virus itself to stay ahead of the developers and target a much smaller audience. It's so not worth trying to do this, infact, that even corporate espionage doesnt bother.
They'll happily hack and undermine each others online games, but none go as far as delivering virii into clients this way simply because of the difficulties associated.
Firewall does not protect you at all in this instance as it is you establishing the connection to the outside world, indeed anyone on an ethernet or wireless router already has the best firewall going - better than any software. Firewalls are only an issue when a machine has direct access to the outside world - ie: on a dial up modem, or on a server in a datacentre.
Anti-Virus software is something I begrudgingly use these days, most of it is utterly useless at detecting and removing any virus you are likely to be infected by, but a full system scan can't be a bad thing to do - but it's email and torrents which cause most virus' to install, and to a lesser extent browser vulnerabilities. Spyware/Adware is also common with popups and anti-virus tools are quite good at dealing with those.
The biggest threat to online gaming security is actually from "gold farmers". People who hack accounts to sell off your items and transfer the gold/platinum/credits/whatever to paying customers.
The only real security against that which i've seen is the Blizzard Authenticator for World of Warcraft which gives you a hardware device to generate a code to enter in addition to your password which is checked server side.
They'll happily hack and undermine each others online games, but none go as far as delivering virii into clients this way simply because of the difficulties associated.
Firewall does not protect you at all in this instance as it is you establishing the connection to the outside world, indeed anyone on an ethernet or wireless router already has the best firewall going - better than any software. Firewalls are only an issue when a machine has direct access to the outside world - ie: on a dial up modem, or on a server in a datacentre.
Anti-Virus software is something I begrudgingly use these days, most of it is utterly useless at detecting and removing any virus you are likely to be infected by, but a full system scan can't be a bad thing to do - but it's email and torrents which cause most virus' to install, and to a lesser extent browser vulnerabilities. Spyware/Adware is also common with popups and anti-virus tools are quite good at dealing with those.
The biggest threat to online gaming security is actually from "gold farmers". People who hack accounts to sell off your items and transfer the gold/platinum/credits/whatever to paying customers.
The only real security against that which i've seen is the Blizzard Authenticator for World of Warcraft which gives you a hardware device to generate a code to enter in addition to your password which is checked server side.