Gamers play spoilsport as hackers in the crosshairs

Anumula was first logged out of his PSN account on June 17. The hacker then used the credit card details saved in Aumula’s account to buy games of value. 11,000 Sony subsequently suspended Aumula’s account for the chargeback.

Aumula’s anger is just an example. As the Indian gaming market is growing, cyber attacks on gamers are becoming rampant.

According to a November report by security firm NortonLifeLock, three out of four gamers in India have experienced some form of cyberattack on their gaming accounts. Four out of five players lost slightly An average of 8,000 caused these attacks, the report said.

“With the advent of real money games more developers are building in-app purchases into their gameplay and more transactions are taking place within games, for criminals to capture high-value data such as banking information and personal identities. has a huge opportunity,” he said. Siddharth Pisharotti, Regional Vice President – India, Southeast Asia and Asia-Pacific Japan, Akamai Technologies.

Pisharotti said gaming apps today are “no different” from fintech and banking applications, which store personally identifiable information (PII) for transactions.

There has been a major change in media consumption habits after the pandemic. In August, market research firm ENV Media Analysts reported that major app and game distributors, including Google Play and the Apple App Store, saw a 50% jump in engagement over the past year. Around 62% of Indian gamers interviewed for the Norton survey said that they started gaming online during the pandemic.

Like most users, gamers can also be easy targets because of their online behavior. Many gamers admit they engage in “risky behavior” online, such as sharing personal information, repeating the same username, password and more, said Ritesh Chopra, director, sales and marketing, India and SAARC, NortonLifeLock. .

Gamers aren’t the only ones under fire. Gaming firms have also seen a significant increase in attacks. Pisharotti said Akamai reported a 340% year-on-year increase in attacks on the gaming industry last year. There was a 224% increase in “credential stuffing” and “bot attacks”, he said.

Credential stuffing is a type of cyber attack where attackers use data obtained from a data breach to login to unrelated services. In bot attacks, hackers use automated web requests to defraud users, disrupt services, and steal data.

Amit Sharma, chief technology officer of DreamSports, the parent company of fantasy gaming platform Dream11, agreed, adding that the attacks had increased “over the years”.

Akamai also noted that even with a 20% drop in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack volume, what happened was still “massive” and was disrupting gameplay communications. In these attacks, hackers disrupt services by overwhelming the servers with automated traffic.

“We have seen an increase in the number of cases where malicious agents have been able to manipulate leaderboards and breach the all-important trust that the industry needs,” Pisharotti said.

Gamers disregard Internet best practices to move forward, while gaming firms often prioritize security in a rush to launch new games, he said.

Finally, the growing interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and blockchain gaming is another factor that makes it attractive to target gamers.

Chopra said there have been several cases of “game developers having their work copied without permission” and sold as NFTs.

This process is known as “sleepminting” and can also allow fraudsters to withdraw an NFT from a game developer’s wallet and transfer them back to their account without any alerts.