Video game crime is almost as old as the industry itself. But while illegal copying and pirated versions of games were the former dominant form of gaming-related illicit activity, recent developments and trends in online gaming platforms have created new possibilities for cybercriminals to scam huge amounts of money from an industry worth nearly $ 100 billion.
And what's worrying is that publishers aren't the only targets; the players themselves are becoming victims of this new form of crime.
Recent trends demonstrate how attractive the gaming community is to cybercriminals and how profitable the game hacking business is, which underscores the importance for developers, manufacturers, and gamers to take game security seriously.
The recent spate of malware attacks against Steam, the leading digital entertainment distribution platform, is a perfect example of how gaming crime has changed in recent years.
For those unfamiliar, Steam is a multi-OS platform owned by the game company Valve, which serves as an e-store for video games. But what started as a basic delivery and patching network has eventually grown into a full game market that has over 125 million members, 12 million concurrent users, and thousands of games.
Aside from buying games online, the platform offers features for game inventories, trading cards, and other valuables to purchase and attach to user accounts.
The transformation that has overtaken the gaming industry, or more specifically the shift to purchasing and storing gaming assets, has created new reasons for malicious actors to try to break into user accounts.
Aside from sensitive financial information, which all online sales platforms contain, Steam Engine now provides attackers with many other elements that can be turned into economic opportunities.
This fueled the development of Steam Stealer, a new generation of malware responsible for the seizure of millions of user accounts. According to recently released official data from Steam, credentials for approximately 77,000 Steam accounts are stolen every month.
Research conducted by cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab identified over 1,200 malware samples. Santiago Pontiroli and Bart P, the researchers who wrote the report, argue that Steam Stealer has "turned the threat landscape to the entertainment ecosystem into a devil's playground."
The malware is distributed through run-of-the-mill phishing campaigns, infected clones of gaming sites like RazerComms and TeamSpeak, or through fake versions of the Steam extension developed for the Chrome browser.
Once the intruder gains access to the victims' credentials, they not only siphon the financial data relating to the account but also take advantage of the possible assets stored in the account and sell them in Steam Trade for extra money.
In some cases, stock items are exchanged for several hundred dollars. According to the Steam website, "there is now enough money to get around the system that stealing virtual goods from steam has become a real business for experienced hackers."
Steam Stealer is being made available on black markets malware for as low as $ 3, which means "a staggering number of script-kiddies and people with technical problems are resorting to this type of threat as malware of choice to enter the cybercrime scene." the Kaspersky report states.
The malware-as-a-service trend is being observed elsewhere, including business ransomware, which, at the moment, is one of the most popular types of malware used by cybercriminals.
WHAT MAKES ATTACKS EFFECTIVE?
Several factors contributed to the success of the attacks against the Steam platform, but the main one is the outdated perception of security in games. Developers and publishers are still focused on hardening their code against reverse engineering and piracy, while the growing threat of data breaches against games and players isn't getting enough attention.
"I think it's because in the gaming world and in the security industry we haven't paid much attention to this issue in the past," says Pontiroli, the Kaspersky researcher, referring to the malware attacks against games.
Players are also responsible for security incidents, Pontiroli believes. "There's this view across the table - from gamers - that antivirus apps slow down their machines or cause them to lose frame rates," he explains, which leads them to disable their antivirus or uninstall them altogether.
"Nowadays you just have to realize that you can lose your account and your information."
A separate Panopticon Labs video game security report on cyberattacks against the gaming industry argues that, compared to financial and retail services, the video game industry is new and very vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
Matthew Cook, the co-founder of Panopticon, believes publishers are putting up with the unwanted behaviors of bad actors and accepting it as a cost to doing business. "Quite often, the editors we talk about refer to fighting these unwanted players as a game of 'hitting a mole' that they can never win," he says.
On the contrary, he believes, publishers can fight back and eliminate fraudulent or malicious activity, provided they get a head start in securing their games and are committed to keeping bad players out after they leave. "Unfortunately, slow manual processes like combing suspicious bad actor reports or running uninspiring quarterly ban activities will no longer cut it," Cook points out.
WHAT IS BEING DONE TO ADDRESS THE THREATS?
Efforts are being made to improve software security, but there is still a long way to go. For its part, Steam has implemented the Steam Guard functionality to help block account hijacking, and it also offers two-factor and risk-based authentication via the Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator.
The company is also strengthening the market and recently introduced new restrictions using email confirmation and a 15-day suspension on traded items to mitigate fraud risks.
Why bother hacking into a banking network when there is easier money to make in the gaming industry?
However, the lack of awareness and focus on the gaming experience leads many users to forgo activating these features. "While (the security features) provide a certain level of security to their users, not everyone is aware of their existence or knows how to configure them correctly,"
Pontiroli says. "Even with all the solutions in the world, it is still necessary to create awareness among the crowd of players."
Security vendors are also making strides to provide security to players without interrupting the gaming experience.
Other companies, such as Panopticon, are working on special in-game security solutions that distinguish suspicious in-game activity from normal player behavior through anomaly detection and analysis. The model is based on the techniques used by fraud detection tools in banking and financial platforms.
This approach also helps address other fraudulent activities such as "gold farming," the process of using botnets to generate game assets and then sell them on gray markets, a business that is amassing billions of dollars in revenue every year.
NOBODY IS SURE
The attacks on Steam are dwarfed by some of the biggest data breaches we've seen in the past year. Nonetheless, it is a clear indication of the transformation and change in the security of online games. Plus, Steam isn't the only platform that has experienced data breaches over the past few months and years.
A similar attack, albeit on a much smaller scale, was observed against Electronic Art's gaming platform Origin late last year (the gaming giant has never confirmed the attacks, however). Several other game consoles and networks have been targeted in recent years, and the scourge of ransomware has already made its way into the gaming industry. This shows that any online game and platform can become the target of cyberattacks.
Nowadays, online games contain a large amount of financial and sensitive information about users, along with other valuable resources. And as is their habit, online scammers and cybercriminals will follow the money and target the weakest targets. So why bother hacking into a banking network when there is easier money to be made in the gaming industry?
Game security requires the collective effort of security vendors and publishers. As Kaspersky's Pontiroli says, "Security shouldn't be something developers think about later, but at an early stage in the game development process. We believe cross-industry cooperation can help improve this situation."
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