Akamai: Cyberattacks against gamers spiked in the pandemic

The video game industry and gamers faced more than 10 billion cyberattacks during the past couple of years, and these spiked in the pandemic, according to a new report by internet delivery and cloud services company Akamai. Hackers tried nearly 10 billion credential-stuffing attacks, where hackers use stolen credentials to take over an account, the author of the report told GamesBeat.

“As games move online and leverage cloud infrastructure and cross-platform and cross-generation play, that’s an attack surface,” Steve Ragan, Akamai security researcher and report author, said in an interview with GamesBeat. “Now, these gaming companies are doing everything they can to protect their players and their games. I’m still concerned because that’s a huge target for criminals. And if the last two years have shown anything, which we demonstrate in the report, criminals are tenacious, they don’t waste time, they’ll go after anything and everything if it’s in front of them. And the bigger the attack surface, the more room they have to play.”