In the world of cybersecurity, some targets are obvious; for example, financial service providers and retail stores, as they handle a large amount of money. But attacking a media company like Cyberattack on company games, on the other hand, can give cybercriminals publicity and from a mix of both factors comes your fascination with video game services.
While a few years ago, game developers and providers did not seem like an obvious target, everything changed after one of the largest cyberattacks in history, which affected the PlayStation Network in 2011 and had shocking results: 77 data was compromised. millions of accounts, 12,000 credit cards were leaked, and the company’s stock prices fell overnight.
While a few years ago, game developers and providers did not seem like an obvious target, everything changed after one of the largest cyberattacks in history, which affected the PlayStation Network in 2011 and had shocking results: 77 millions of data was compromised, 12,000 credit cards were leaked, and the company’s stock prices fell overnight.
Types of Cyberattack on Company of games
DDoS attacks to interrupt service
Denial of service (DoS) attacks or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are often used by attackers to bring down an online site or service, by flooding the recipient’s web server with too much traffic, causing it to crash. and the service is interrupted.
Various groups of hackers, such as the Lizard Squad, have used DDoS attacks in the past, including on gaming sites. Perhaps the most famous was against Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live, which went offline in Christmas 2014, causing thousands of players to be unable to access both services.
Money theft with ransomware and scareware
In 2015 it was discovered that cybercriminals were infecting players’ machines with Teslacrypt, stopping their games and requiring a payment in bitcoins in exchange for the safe return of their encrypted game files. Once the infection was made, the malicious program searched for the games saved by the users and encrypted them. The victim had to pay at least $ 500 in bitcoins to get them back. The malware was said to have affected 40 games, including favorites like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, and World of Tanks.
Brute force attacks and keyloggers to obtain passwords
Attackers always go after login usernames and passwords, and this is largely regardless of what industry the victim’s business is in. Gaming sites are not exempt from this, as the DerpTrolling group demonstrated when it published a database with thousands of usernames and user passwords from three major networks: PSN, 2K Game Studios and Windows Live.
The most common way to obtain them is through simple guessing, as weak passwords are unfortunately still a reality. Attackers will also seek to carry out brute force attacks (an attempt to crack a password using a password library) and use keyloggers (software to record the keys used on a keyboard).
