How to stop losing revenues and players to cybera ttacks
0How to stop losing revenues and players to cybera.ttacks.
The video game market has grown to $116 billion worldwide, and that makes it a big target for cyber criminals.
Sony felt the sting of cyberattacks in 2011 when hacktivist group Anonymous took down its PlayStation Network. That forced Sony’s CEO to apologize to all of the company’s game customers. But that was hardly the only attack. Video game publishers lose up to 40 percent of their in-game revenue and microtransactions to fraud each year, and ransomware has taken off as well. In 2016, Valve disclosed that Steam Stealer malware was compromising 77,000 accounts a month.
That resulted in a huge loss of revenues and players as well. I recently joined a webinar with a couple of security experts at game companies about this problem. The panelists included Ryan Safarian, vice president of engineering at user acquisition firm JumpRamp Games, and Arash Haghighi, manager of infrastructure at Smilegate West, publisher of online games such as Crossfire, one of the largest first-person shooter titles in the world.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview, including questions from our audience. The session was sponsored by Akamai. (Here’s an audio version of the session).