Attacks on Gamers

Gone are the days where Gamers had to fear attacks from the bullies on the playground, being wedgied by the senior rugby team, or having a “nerd” sticker secretly patted on your back by the netball squad. These days, PC gamers are much more relaxed in status but need to fear far scarier attacks, attacks in the cyber world, and not the fun kind with a digital feast in celebration of successfully protecting the empire you spent so many hours building. Nope, in the modern world, the only attacks gamers really and truly should fear, are the attacks by Cyber Hackers.

Stats of Attacks

Between November 2017 and March 2019, 55 billion cyber-attacks took place, with 12 billion of these attacks targeting gamers. They hack the automated tools on your browser to obtain your login credentials in the hopes that the same username and password is used across all or most of your accounts, or at least a variation of the login details they have stolen. Once these details have been harvested, the trespasser can use the features to stream illegally or sell on the dark web, and the gaming industry and their communities are favoured targets for these criminals.

But what’s so appealing about Gamers?

According to Akamai Technologies, the gaming community is the most fruitful community for these slimy thieves. The in-game purchases and the easily exchangeable items for cash make them easy targets for the hacking community. On top of this, gamers are stereotyped as big spenders, or rather a demographic who spend a lot, making their financial status very appealing.

Who is attacking who?

At the top of the attacking list is the United States with Russia and China hot on their heels. In an unlucky turn of events, the United States is also at the top of the target list with India and Canada coming in second and third. So if you are a big gamer and you don’t want to have your information on a list. Mix it up, use multiple usernames with different passwords and make them as hard as possible, your granny’s birthdate or your wedding anniversary will just not cut it, neither will the name of your first pet.

What is Credential Stuffing?

In layman’s terms, the bad guys take a mega list of usernames and passwords. They try to sell them into the login section of other online sites, and because the average joe doesn’t realize the seriousness of using individual passwords for each of his accounts (and changing them often), he utilizes the same information over and over, allowing the cybercriminals to login to multiple sites with just one combination of username and password. Besides changing your password regularly and making sure they are reliable, different passwords (use a password manager to remember each one), activate two-step authentication where ever you can and lastly, don’t connect to public wifi networks.