Learn what online threats hang over present-day gamers and how they can stay safe.
According to the latest stats, many present-day gamers underestimate the threat that comes from malicious programs and cyber criminals.
• Only 15% of gamers understand that they can become the target of cyber criminals.
• 33% consider financial losses as a result of cyber-attacks – extremely unlikely.
• 81% of the respondents believe that their data is not interesting to hackers.
Gamers are a unique segment of computer users that virus writers like to target. Gamers traditionally neglect antivirus protection for the sake of PC performance. Gamers are all very different in terms of infoseс skills. They also differ in the number and quality of valuable game resources which hackers can steal and sell.
Gamers can be divided into three groups:
• Super fans and professionals. Their chests are full of artifacts.
• Casual gamers. They play just to relax and get away from work or problems. Their machines and accounts will be useful to fraudsters during advanced attacks and cyber extortion.
• Children and teenagers. They can be both superfans and casual gamers. Sometimes they are very young. In this case, their parents’ wallets become the target of cyber-attacks. Usually, criminals offer stolen artifacts to young gamers "for free."
Because of teenagers’ maximalism, children tend to ignore most safety recommendations on the one hand and want to try the taboo on the other. Therefore, using parental controls to prevent online infections and data theft is mandatory for them.
Unbelievable but one of the first malicious programs - not a virus, but a Trojan - was a computer game Pervading Animal. With the help of several questions, the program tried to guess the name of the animal conceived by the user. It was written with an error - after adding new questions, the modified game was written over the old version and copied to other directories (self-replicating), which caused the disc to overflow after a while. Pervading Animal was distributed with the help of its victims and performed unknown actions in the background - this indicates it was a classic Trojan.
Attackers direct their attention to places where they can find something to profit from. Their targets are accounts and artifacts – anything valuable to gamers that can be stolen and sold.
Hackers look for characters with the maximum number of different skills and experience points, the ones that have rare game ammunition, armor, etc. Such game characters and accounts may cost up 500 USD. Given the cost of the accounts and expensive artifacts, you can say without exaggeration that gamers and their property are tasty fruits to cyber criminals.
The most primitive case is when cyber criminals simply sell a stolen account using a specially designed online store.
Steal artifacts and resell them. Scammers can transfer all artifacts from one to another.
Fraudulent loans: the new owners of the stolen account, using the trust of their peers, can borrow virtual money or rob a virtual bank. As a result, reputation is ruined forever, you are banned from the game server and sometimes even get psychological trauma. And in the case of a child's vulnerable mental nature, this can lead to very serious consequences.
Distribute phishing links. Attackers distribute them on behalf of the account owner, for example, by publishing information about online contests, requiring to register on a third-party site or advertising cheating software. All these lead to malware downloads.
Cyber extortion: the player's property is of value to him, and this is used by hackers who block access to the account and require to pay a ransom.
Do not click on the links if you are not 100% sure that they will lead exactly where you need them.
Download games only from known trusted sources, and when buying game artifacts, use only proven markets.
Do not publish your personal data on the Internet.
Make sure that all current OS and software updates are installed on your computer.
Be sure to use the latest version of the antivirus program. Update it before each visit to the game server.
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