Presented by Akamai Technologies
There’s real money to be stolen from games and gamers, and the variety and number of threats just keep growing. To learn how to protect your game and users, how threats are changing, and how to be safe without impacting your game’s performance, join this VB Live event.
Games are tempting targets for hackers, with a wealth of personal, financial, and virtual data up for grabs. Take for example the recent hack of a wildly popular online game — Words with Friends — owned by Zynga, one of the largest gaming companies in the industry. Over 218 million users had their information breached, and Zynga moved immediately to make amends, both reporting the breach to law enforcement and launching a forensic security investigation.
Once your game is hacked, your vulnerabilities are exposed and can be patched, preventing a similar attack. But these kinds of attacks for games of every size and type also do massive damage to your reputation among players, their trust in you and your security practices, and your bottom line. Reparations can be costly, and it takes a long time to recover consumer confidence; in the meantime, your profits continue to suffer.
The other bad news is that security issues are never going to go away, unfortunately, because cyber criminals are infinitely adaptable. As fast as known security issues are addressed or types of breaches are identified by companies, attackers find new ways around them and brand new ways to break in. It can become a game of cat and mouse for developers, if they’re not prepared.
Here’s how to get prepared.
To sum up: Digital security, once considered a cost center, now needs to be the foundation of your game’s success. Security needs to be part of your ongoing security, risk management, and compliance strategy. Security needs to be centered in your development decisions from the ground up, and leadership and decision makers need to be completely on board. And security leaders need to find the right talent and the right technology to implement a security leader’s protocols and strategies at scale.
The other important factor: your security solution should never impact a user’s experience or a game’s performance. Players are notoriously demanding when it comes to their gaming experience, and will always expect one hundred percent uptime, no delays and no glitches. Those kinds of issues will immediately negatively impact your game’s reputation through word of mouth.
The first step is a rigorous risk assessment, identifying clearly the threats that your game is potentially vulnerable to, how likely each threat is, and how much damage your game, your users, and your company would sustain if a hacker took advantage. You also need to take a good hard look at all possible security weakness and holes, like the operating system on your web server that needs to be patched; asking only for single-level authentication from both your users and employees; failing to use complex enough passwords; not having enough bandwidth to withstand a DDoS attack; unsecured servers or data collections, and more.
This threat and risk assessment is essential to making sure leadership understands the need to close all those holes, secure your assets, and be proactive in developing a 360-degree, 24/7 security strategy to ensure that you’re never in that position again.
How you manage it depends on your resources — time, money, and talent. You can integrate an innovative AI-powered security platform with the tools and dashboards you need to bring your security stance up to speed, and then continue to identify and neutralize threats. You could also tap a managed security service — the right one will offer you a personalized security assessment, a plan to move forward, and the high-powered technology and tools to implement that plan. Note that in a world where the threats keep coming and security is key to your game’s reputation and your bottom line, relying on a partner is really often the most cost effective bet in the end.
To learn more about what kind of threats the gaming industry in particular is facing, from fraud to phishing to outright threats, how to protect your most important asset: your users, and how and where to start building security best practices, don’t miss this VB Live event.
Don’t miss out!
You’ll learn:
- How to protect your game and players from a growing amount of online security threats
- The latest trends in credential abuse and account hacks in gaming
- How web attacks are evolving and where they are headed in the future
- How to integrate security best practices with the rest of the game for best performance
Speakers:
- Scott Adams, Founder & CEO, FraudPVP
- Lonnye Bower, COO, ProbablyMonsters
- Steve Ragan, Senior Technical Writer, Akamai Technologies
- Jonathan Singer, Sr. Manager, Global Games Industry, Akamai Technologies
- Dean Takahashi, Lead Gaming Writer, VentureBeat