What is happening to the gaming companies because of the pandemic?

With Covid-19 lockdown, many people have turned to video games as a popular form of entertainment. In October, S&P Global Market Intelligence reported that the second quarter of 2020 was a boon to many gaming platforms and companies like Microsoft, doubled its year over year Xbox Shipments. This has also created a fear in the mind of people relating to various cyber threats. There has been a substantial-high volume of cyber-attacks in the period from July 2018 to June 2020, which includes 152 million web application attacks.

Earlier this month a gaming company named Among Us suffered from nearly 5 million people’s data that got breached, Gaming Giant Capcom was also impacted by a massive ransomware attack on 350,000 people, and recently Animal Jam, a popular form of online gaming company has also complained about 32 million data getting breached. Stolen information in the above includes email addresses, usernames, passwords, and other personal information. This information of the users can easily be sold in dark marketplaces across the world. It has actually reminded the industry that the threat has increased.

The various ways in which attacks can take place:

1.Malicious use of source code:

The major threat here is the malicious use of the source code. There are two ways in which source code can be maliciously used by the company:

• Using the source code to identify the weakness and modifying it to give advantage to players in unfair ways or making an attempt to breach their data.
• The second method is by predatory pricing wherein a similar game is created and hosted just free of cost for downloading.

2. Misusing IP address:

Stealing IP can also lead to major material weakness for the company. Attackers can cause plenty of damage simply by stealing user data for the purpose of selling credentials which may lead to various phishing and account takeover schemes.

3. DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attacks:

When multiple online devices that are connected, known as ‘botnet’, are used to flood a target gaming website by fake traffic it’s called a DDOS attack.

4. SQL Injection:

In web applications majority were SQL injection attacks. It’s basically designed to use data stored in databases of targeted servers, by login credentials and personal data.

How to avoid such ransomware attacks?