Do cybercriminals play cyber games during quarantine?

[harlan4096]

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, the role of the Internet in our lives has undergone changes, including irreversible ones. Some of these changes are definitely for the better, some are not very good, but almost all of them in some way affect digital security issues.

We decided to take a closer look at the changes around us through the prism of information security, starting with the video game industry.

Key findings:

• The daily number of blocked attempts to visit malicious gaming-related websites, or browse to such sites from gaming-related websites (or forums), increased by 54% in Aprilcompared to January of this year. In May, we saw a downward trend in this indicator: -18% compared to April.
  
• The number of blocked attempts to visit phishing sites that exploit online gaming topics has increased. In particular, the number of notifications from fake Steam gaming platform sites increased by 40% from February to April.
  
• Attackers use Minecraft, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt most often.
  
• The users most targeted by such attacks are from Vietnam (7.9%), Algeria (6.6%), Korea (6.2%), Hungary (6.2%) and Romania (6%)
  

I play until the boss sees

Figures from various sources show that the pandemic has led to a sharp increase in player activity. In March, according to gamesindustry.biz, sales of games, both computer and console, increased significantly.

In April, the number of downloads, as well as the number of simultaneous online players, of Steam reached record levels. The Steam user activity graph (both in-game and just installing the client) (Steam Database) shows the peak of activity on April 4. After that, activity started to reduce, but only slowly. Moreover, the activity graphs of the players are noticeably different from the usual ones – periods of inactivity are less pronounced than in ordinary pre-quarantine days, and the peaks last longer.

All these stats are totally understandable. First, people have more free time for games. Statistics collected by Nielsen Games as part of their regular survey of gamers confirms this thesis.

Second, apparently not all people who wanted to spend time playing video games had a computer at home that would let them do it. That’s what you can figure out checking out the hardware statistics displayed on the Steam site.

If you look closely at the graphics containing information on the video cards used by Steam users, you can see a clear change in graphics cards, which were completely flat before, occurring in March 2020. Until now, the proportions of Nvidia, Intel and AMD video cards have remained at the same level relative to each other. Since the beginning of quarantine, the share of Intel and AMD video cards has grown quite noticeably. This growth was within 2%, which might seem insignificant, until you remember that there are more than 20 million Steam users. That is, the additional number of devices with Intel and AMD graphics cards amounted to hundreds of thousands of computers. Given the specifics of video cards from different manufacturers, we can safely assume that these hundreds of thousands of devices are office laptops that arrived at home during quarantine and that people installed Steam while the boss wasn’t able to see it anyway.
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