Playing with Viruses

According to the latest stats, many present-day gamers underestimate the threat that comes from malicious programs and cyber criminals.

• Only 15% of gamers understand that they can become the target of cyber criminals.

• 33% consider financial losses as a result of cyber-attacks – extremely unlikely.

• 81% of the respondents believe that their data is not interesting to hackers.

Gamers are a unique segment of computer users that virus writers like to target. Gamers traditionally neglect antivirus protection for the sake of PC performance. Gamers are all very different in terms of infoseс skills. They also differ in the number and quality of valuable game resources which hackers can steal and sell.

Who is most vulnerable to cyber-attacks?

Gamers can be divided into three groups:

• Super fans and professionals. Their chests are full of artifacts.

• Casual gamers. They play just to relax and get away from work or problems. Their machines and accounts will be useful to fraudsters during advanced attacks and cyber extortion.

• Children and teenagers. They can be both superfans and casual gamers. Sometimes they are very young. In this case, their parents’ wallets become the target of cyber-attacks. Usually, criminals offer stolen artifacts to young gamers "for free."

Because of teenagers’ maximalism, children tend to ignore most safety recommendations on the one hand and want to try the taboo on the other. Therefore, using parental controls to prevent online infections and data theft is mandatory for them.

All viruses originated from... games!

Unbelievable but one of the first malicious programs - not a virus, but a Trojan - was a computer game Pervading Animal. With the help of several questions, the program tried to guess the name of the animal conceived by the user. It was written with an error - after adding new questions, the modified game was written over the old version and copied to other directories (self-replicating), which caused the disc to overflow after a while. Pervading Animal was distributed with the help of its victims and performed unknown actions in the background - this indicates it was a classic Trojan.

What do hackers look for?

Attackers direct their attention to places where they can find something to profit from. Their targets are accounts and artifacts – anything valuable to gamers that can be stolen and sold.

Hackers look for characters with the maximum number of different skills and experience points, the ones that have rare game ammunition, armor, etc. Such game characters and accounts may cost up 500 USD. Given the cost of the accounts and expensive artifacts, you can say without exaggeration that gamers and their property are tasty fruits to cyber criminals.

How do hackers profit from their activities?

How to be safe: