Video Gamers Are In The Target Area

The online gaming industry is much bigger than you might think, with an estimated value of $200 billion in 2020 and with lockdown restrictions in place in many countries, a lot more on-line gaming is taking place.

The growing success of this industry and the multitude of users also draws the  attention to cyber criminals looking for new targets and it turns out the gaming industry has not been prioritising its cyber security.  Cyber security researchers analysts have discovered that half a million gaming companies employees’ information have been breached, along with a million compromised internal accounts on the Dark Web.

The leading video game-maker Capcom (Resident Evil, Street Fighter, and Mega Man) announced  its computer systems were hacked at the end of 2020 , in just the  the latest known cyber attack to hit the games industry.  It said some of its internal networks had been suspended "due to unauthorised access" from outside Capcom. But it said "at present", there was no sign that customer information had been accessed.

The security intelligence firm KELA has inspected  the top  25 publicly listed companies in the gaming sector, delving in to Dark Web marketplaces, and has found a thriving black market including nearly one million compromised accounts related to employee- and customer-facing resources, 50% which were listed for sale in 2020. 

Compromised accounts were found for nearly all of the top 25 gaming companies studied. This could put these firms at risk of customer data theft, corporate espionage, ransomware and more.

KELA said it had tracked ransomware attacks on four gaming companies in recent months. Elsewhere, the researchers found half-a-million gaming employee credentials exposed on the dark web after breaches at third-party firms, many of which were available for free. These could also provide attackers with a useful foothold in victim networks, they warned. KELA has urged gaming companies to invest in ongoing monitoring of their digital assets across the dark web, as well as enhanced staff training on things like password management, and deployment of multi-factor authentication (MFA).

According to the Cloud delivery network provider Akamai Technologies, the gaming community is among the most lucrative targets for hackers to make a quick profit. In its research report, “2019 State of the Internet/Security Web Attacks and Gaming Abuse” Akamai stated that there were 55 billion cases across all industries.

The report highlighted that nearly 67% of credential stuffing attacks target organizations based in the United States. It stated that Russia is the second largest source of application attacks and China is ranked as the fourth highest source country. 
On the other hand, the United Kingdom ranked as the second highest targeted country with Japan, Canada, Australia, and Italy are all also among the countries most targeted.

When considering hacking and other cyber security problems, the gaming industry is frequently ignored, but the evidence shows that the gaming industry is highly vulnerable to security concerns and many customers are completely unaware of how much danger their personal information might be in.

KELA:        BBC:      Infosecurity:        CISO Mag:       TecEze: 

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