Playing unfair: cybercriminals set their sights on gamers

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According to data from KSN*,Kaspersky Lab experts recorded 7,000 attempts to infect gamers around the worldevery day in 2012. These attacks are launched in an attempt to gain access topersonal user data, such as passwords to online games and online bankingsystems. Where games are concerned, malicious users attempt to steal avatarsand in-game items to subsequently sell these virtual goods for real money. Inthe case of online banking, cybercriminals aim to steal money directly fromreal bank accounts.

As KasperskyLab experts discovered, in order to do this, malicious users send an average of10 emails with malicious links and attachments to gamers every day, in additionto making roughly 500 attempts to infect gamers via browser-based attacks.What’s more, the company’s “collection” of malicious programs targeting onlinegames is increasing at a rate of 5,000 new programs a day.

One of malicious users’ mostfavored tactics in the world of online games is, of course, social engineering— phishing in particular. For example, cybercriminals invoke the names ofwell-known gaming worlds and desperately try to lure gamers to their fakewebsites in order to harvest passwords from registered gaming accounts. In2012, Kaspersky Lab experts recorded 15 million attempted visits to phishingwebsites designed to look like the pages of one of the largest developers ofonline games. As it turns out, there were up to 50,000 attempted redirects tophishing sites each day. Fortunately, all of these trusting users were saved bythe professional anti-phishing system built into Kaspersky Internet Security,which promptly detected the threat.

Threats targeting gamers arefound all over the world but are, of course, not found in equal concentrationseverywhere as their numbers are in direct correlation to the number of activeplayers found in different countries. In 2012, the top 3 unlucky targetedcountries turned out to be Russia, China, and India. These are the countrieswere gamers face the highest risk of infection and subsequent theft of avatarsand in-game valuables. We also hasten to note that this list of “leaders” hasremained more or less unchanged over several years, and there is,unfortunately, no reason to expect malicious users to lessen their interest inthis area.

Nevertheless, it is entirelypossible to protect oneself and one’s in-game alter-ego against attacks fromcybercriminals. At first glance, expert recommendations appear to be obvious,although in practice they have proven to be effective time and again. KasperskyLab’s malware expert Sergey Golovanov suggests that gamers adhere to thefollowing simple code of Internet conduct:

“First and foremost, one needs tobe alert when receiving emails featuring, for example, a request from an onlinegame’s admin server for personal information about your account or anauthorization offer under some pretext. Don’t just click on the link right away- it could be a phishing site.

“Next, don’t download unofficialpatches from dubious sources — you could easily end up downloading a ‘bonus’ inthe form of a Trojan that would then infiltrate your system and start stealingall of your passwords. And I don’t mean just for online games, but also forbank cards, if your bank offers online services. With this in mind, gamersmight consider keeping an up-to-date virtual debit card that lets them limittheir spending to an amount they choose – with no risk of someone else cleaningout their account.”

All the same, malicious users arejust that, and some of them can outsmart even the most cautious user. That iswhy experts strongly recommend using professional security solutions. Forexample, KasperskyInternet Security 2013 contains the most up-to-datetechnologies available today for detecting and blocking malicious programs —particularly anti-phishing, automatic security against exploits, a virtualkeyboard for entering usernames and passwords, and many other functions.

Furthermore,it includes a special gaming mode that will run with minimal interference orburden on your system resources and will turn off notifications as soon as thegame is launched.