Attacks on video game companies doubled in the last year, according to a study

Aug. 4 (Portaltic/EP) –

Attacks on companies and web applications dedicated to the video game sector have more than doubled in the last year due to, according to a recent study by Akamai Technologies.

The security, performance and cloud distribution company has reached this conclusion thanks to the analysis ‘Gaming has risen’which notes that these attacks follow the rise in popularity and demand for cloud gaming platforms.

As mentioned in this paper, attacks on web applications in the gaming sector put players’ accounts at risk of being exposed to cybercriminals.

These, in turn, can sell these profiles or steal personal information that these contain, such as passwords and credentials to access credit cards.

Akamai Technologies points out in this report that the gaming industry is the target of 37 percent of denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks, which cause a service or resource to be inaccessible to legitimate users. This would indicate that attacks on video game companies doubled in the last year, according to their latest records.

“Cybercriminals they tend to interrupt live services and they take over credentials to steal gaming assets”, commented the senior strategist of this company, Jonathan Singer, in a press release sent to Europa Press.

This specialist has pointed out in turn that “With the industry expanding into cloud gaming, New threat surfaces have been opened up for attackers with the addition of new players, who are the main target for cybercriminals.”

So much so that attacks on web applications in the ‘gaming’ sector have grown by 167 percent from the first quarter of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022, which has affected millions of video game player accounts around the world. world.

Specifically, the United States appears as the main target of the attackers, followed by Switzerland, India, Japan, the United Kingdom and other nations in Europe and Asia.

The main reason for the growth of these attacks is due, according to the company, to the fact that video game companies are moving operations to the cloud, thus creating new threat surfaces for hackers.

In this environment also stand out microtransactions as the main threat, since, according to reports, the microtransaction market is expected to reach 104,000 million euros in 2026, which makes them the focus of interest for cyber criminals.

These processes, which are widespread in the gaming sector, are of great interest to criminals, who can subtly take advantage of players’ purchasing power without attracting excessive attention.