Safety in online gaming is an unstable thing. A recent ADL study found that 65% of online gamers have experienced cybercrime at least once – bullying, viruses, DDoS attacks, ransomware. Seemingly harmless, online games are fraught with danger. Especially if the gamer is a child or teenager. Let’s talk about how to protect yourself in online games.
Online games
In 2020, DFC Intelligence published statistics showing that there are 3.1 billion video game fans and active online casino players on the planet. In fact, 40% of the world’s population has gamed at least once. About half of the players prefer the entertainment on the computer, while the rest play on smartphones and consoles.
By the way, cell phones are playing the most games lately. But the biggest profit is made by the console players. Most gamers live in Asia, followed by Europe and Latin America. Fourth closes North America.
Online games are especially popular. For example, in the U.S., the ratio of digital entertainment to physical gaming is 83% vs. 17%. The total revenue of online gaming industry in the world has reached $1.3 billion.
By the way, advanced gamers who know how encrypted connectivity protects against DDoS attacks (driving the system to failure) thrive in online gaming. And they also reduce the lag time between servers for games, because these gamers have long been aware of what a VPN is.
Tricks and tricks
Online gaming attracts gamers from all over the world. But they also look tempting to hackers who have something to gain from gameplay.
Often players become victims of DDoS attacks. The reason is that gamers’ stakes are high. Competitors often use this type of attack to take opponents out of the game, not to let new promising players enter the game. In addition, due to DDoS attacks there is a time delay, and this has a significant impact on the quality of the game. As a result, tired of the constant bugs in the game, gamers prefer a direct competitor of the game company that suffered from the attack. We are talking about the loss of customer trust, as well as growing losses.
From 2015 to 2018, the number of DDoS attacks increased 2.5 times. While in 2015 the purpose of the attack was to demonstrate the abilities of hackers, by 2019 the DDOS attack has become an effective tool in the fight against competitors. Attacks to bring the system to failure took up 30% of gaming traffic per month, according to Cisco statistics.
According to Nexusguard statistics, in December 2020, 77% of all cyber attacks were concentrated in the area of online gaming. At the same time, it is recorded that the number of DDoS attacks in 2020 was 287% higher than in 2019.
This alarming data suggests that online gaming will continue to be of interest to hackers in 2021.
To protect yourself from DDoS attacks, it pays to enable a virtual private network. This will help encrypt the connection from intruders.
In addition, a VPN allows you to reduce the ping during online gaming. Essentially, the shorter the distance between a particular user and the game servers, the more the lag time, better known as the ping, is reduced. You can literally act in real time, because the mobile device, PC or app you use to play the game is rapidly exchanging massive amounts of data with the game servers. This affects the quality of the game, allowing you to overtake even the most inveterate and advanced opponents. In this case, the victory usually belongs to the one who joined the closest game server.
Considering the fact that often network providers purposely control certain types of traffic, users bypass restrictions with the help of VPN. A virtual network helps bring the connection level to the default setting, and sometimes even significantly increases the speed of online gaming.
In addition, you can play with users from different countries using a virtual network, because the VPN allows you to change the location of the server.
What are the dangers of online gaming?
If you ignore the principles of cybersecurity in online gaming, you may encounter bullying. Scammers steal accounts to get into a player’s computer.
Breaking security in online gaming is quite easy. Thus, many have encountered a situation where an opponent offers help in the game and drops off a link to go forward. But in fact, opening this URL, you will get a lot of viruses and spyware on your computer. Or give criminals access to your account, which they use to phish other users.
A study of the risks that attack security in online gaming shows that 73.7% of cybercrime is identity theft and 20.2% is fraud. Internet café players (54.8%) are the primary victims of crime, and this is due to an insecure connection to a public Wi-Fi connection.
Generally, a victim of online gambling fraud loses between $100 and $300, sometimes as much as $500.
How to protect security in online games?
Numerous cybercrimes are not a reason to give up on online gaming. Agree that it is very exciting to compete not with the computer, but with people, even if hidden behind nicknames and scattered all over the planet. After all, the computer’s behavior in most games can be predicted, while humans tend to be more unpredictable.
That’s why you need to follow the principles of Internet safety.
- Pay attention to the sites from which you download the game. Keep an eye on their rating and read the reviews from users. Otherwise you may get a problem instead of the game.
- Entering the online game, you will see banners with advertisements. Do not follow these links, because they may contain viruses.
- When registering a game account do not specify your real name, last name, date and place of birth, residence address. If a hacker wants to hack your account, personal information will be a boon to fraudsters.
- Log into the game through a secure VPN connection so that your IP address is not known to other players on the network whose intentions you do not know.
- Never open links from other players, unless it is a prerequisite of gameplay.
- To log into your account, use a strong random password that does not duplicate your old codes and consists of numbers and letters. Preferably at least eight characters. This kind of password is harder to crack.
- Install antivirus and software from official sources on the device you are using for gameplay. Try not to use a public Wi-Fi connection to avoid data theft.
- Take advantage of cloud-based SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services to bolster your online gaming security. To some extent, this machine only works when someone is gamming. As soon as the game stops, the machine or server is dismantled. So you don’t have to fear that hackers will break into your system when you’re out of the game. “Cloud services significantly reduce the risk of DDoS attacks in online games.
At first glance, it seems: what are the caveats if you’re just playing a regular game? But what for you is fun, for a hacker is work. This means that every online gamer should think about online safety.
I would like to wish you never to fall for the bait of cybercriminals. And have a good game!