It is not all just fun and games.
Some facts to get you scared:
- Over the last few years Gaming industry has become one of the most popular ones to encounter cyber attacks.
- Over the past 17 months there was 12 billion credential stuffing attacks in gaming industry.
- 67% of credential stuffing cases occur in the United States. Russia, UK, Canada, Australia, China, Japan and Italy are one of the most attacked countries.
- Back in 2015 CSO Online (security and risk management company) managed to crack 80% off the passwords from hash list leaked from MMO Kings site. They managed to do it in 45 minutes.
- Steam (the largest online gaming store and community) suffered from a major data breach that resulted in 77,000 compromised accounts.
Although anything online can be stolen, gamers are among the popular ones to get hacked. There is no surprise that a lot of companies that sell and develop video games have encountered huge data breaches during the past few years and millions of users data was and still is in danger.
Why Gamer are at great risk
Gamers credentials are in a lot of danger because of few reasons. First of all, since many gaming accounts have a lot of sensitive information such as users banking credentials(many games require to make some kind of purchases, like buying items and etc.).
It makes sense why Gamers accounts are very popular among hackers, since by stealing them hackers can also steal money from players. Also by stealing users credentials cyber criminals can use those accounts for doing all sorts of other crimes online, they can also earn quite a big share of money by selling the stolen accounts, especially if they are well built.
How to secure your gaming account
1. Passwords
The most important security precaution is strong password for your account. There is no surprise here that many gamers (and not just gamers) do not actually care about making their passwords secure. Although we all know that passwords need to be at least 12 characters long, include numbers, lower and uppercase letters, signs, most of us usually create weak passwords just because we want to easily remember them.
Another problem appears when gamers use the same password everywhere. One of the example is using the same password on your game account and gamer forums you participate in.
Forums are super easy to hack, since they do not care about security and are usually created voluntarily by gaming fans, who just don’t have time and money to ensure forums security.
So imagine if a forum that you participate in gets hacked and the hacker has your credentials. Then he can easily access your gaming account (if you use the same or similar credentials) and then steal that account, access your banking information and etc.
So what to do?
Well first of all use a secure password. You don’t need to come up with the password yourself, you can use many strong password generators online.
Secondly use a password manager to store all of your passwords. Since you will need to create a different password for all of you accounts it will be hard to remember all of them.
Password manager will remember them all for you, you will only need to know one password — to access the password manager.
There are many password managers you can use:
2. VPN
Many gamers are against using VPN for gaming, since many VPN do decrease internet speed, but actually VPN can help to decrease lag with games (if you use fast one). Also VPN is useful for bypassing all sorts of geographical restrictions.
For example, if some sort of game is not available in your region, by simply log into your VPN, change your location and IP address and you will be able to access any game.
But talking about your account security VPN helps in many cases. First of all if you use Public Wifi you must already know that it is really easy for hackers to compromise public wifi and steal your sensitive information like gaming accounts credentials.
VPN also encrypts your traffic and helps you to secure yourself from all sorts of malware, trackers, DDoS attacks.
When choosing a VPN for gaming you need to look for a few features: Fast servers, no logging policy (this means that free VPNs are a bad choice since they collect data), built-in kill-switch.
There are few fast VPNs that go well with gaming:
- Surfshark VPN ($1.99/mo)
- NordVPN ($3.49/mo)
- ExpressVPN ($8.32/mo)
- Perfect Privacy ($9.99/mo)
3. Phishing
And one last threat that occurs often while gaming — Phishing. Phishing attacks occurs when hackers try to lure your account credentials through fake emails, all sorts of links, messages. Hackers usually send you a fake email (that looks really legit) and asks you to log into your account through a link they put in the email. And that is how they get you.
To secure yourself from such attacks you just need to be careful, don’t press any links on emails, when you want to log into your account go straight to the website and then log in.