Do cybercriminals play cyber games in quarantine? A look one year later

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Last year, we decided to take a look at how the pandemic influenced the gaming industry and what new threats gamers could be facing. What we found was that, with the transition to remote work and remote learning, the number of blocked attempts to visit malicious game-related websites or follow malicious links from legitimate game-related websites and forums, increased by more than 50%. One year later, as the pandemic continues, we decided to revisit the threat landscape for gamers and the gaming industry.

Here’s what we found:

• Online gamers have become even more active over the past year, and cybercriminals continue to exploit this.
  
• Criminals are actively targeting leaders in the gaming industry to retrieve the source code of their games.
  
• The games most often used as bait were Minecraft and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO).
  

They played, they play, and they’ll keep playing

In 2020, the number of gamers worldwide surpassed 2.7 million. According to data from Newzoo, the largest percentage of active users live in the Asia-Pacific.

And the number of video-game enthusiasts just keeps on growing every year. This is reflected in the statistics on the number of active players using the Steam platform. They dropped off slightly after reaching the all-time peak in May 2020 mentioned in our last year’s report. However, they didn’t fall back to pre-COVID levels. At the end of the summer holidays, the number of active users began to grow again reaching an all-time high of almost 27 million players in March 2021.

Last year, we also reviewed reports from Steam on the hardware players used and noticed an increase in the share of Intel and AMD graphics cards, which was maintained until spring 2020. This growth suggests hundreds of thousands of work computers were connected to Steam. This year’s report looked at the period from December 2019 to May 2021, which shows that not only were work computers connected to Steam, but they also remained connected. The percentage of Intel and AMD video graphics cards stabilized again, but at the level it had reached at the beginning of the pandemic. Given that the amount of Intel and AMD cards has remained the same while the number of Steam users continues to grow, this means that even more office computers are being connected to Steam.What are cybercriminals playing?There’s been more than just a handful of cybercriminal attacks aimed at the gaming industry over the past year. In May for example, criminals attacked one of Sony’s flagship games — Little Big Planet. The developers were even forced to turn off the gaming servers for a period of time. And not long ago at the beginning of June 2021, one of the largest gaming companies — EA Games — was hacked, with attackers managing to steal the source code for several games. At the same time, the company CD Projekt reported the theft of their data, which could possibly have included the source code for Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3. Not only can these attacks result in source code falling into the hands of competitors, but the attackers may also discover and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities in the gaming software.

Cybercriminals aren’t just attacking companies, they’re still attacking gamers too. If you look at the statistics for web antivirus detections on sites that exploit the gaming theme, there was a very notable surge in sites using the names of popular video games and gaming platforms from November to December 2020.

This surge is most likely connected with the launch of Cyberpunk 2077. Attackers were probably trying everything they could to exploit the hotly anticipated release by tricking impatient gamers.
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