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.
