Hackers Target Gamers Through Code And Cheat Downloads even though gamers tend to be surprisingly tech-savvy. They’re a bit harder to trick with social engineering than many other groups. However, gamers do have a weakness, and it’s one that hackers worldwide have recently begun to exploit systematically.
Increasingly, security researchers are finding instances of poison cheat codes used when hackers target gamers.
The basic idea is the gamer downloads a set of cheat codes for his or her current obsession. Lurking inside it is an embedded bit of malicious code, capable of deploying back doors to allow for further malware infection, as well as keystroke logging code. That enables the hackers controlling it to capture a wide range of passwords and other personal information from the compromised system.
Even worse, there’s a growing body of evidence that hackers are launching supply chain attacks against game development companies themselves. They’re specifically targeting Asian companies in a bid to infect vast numbers of systems and based on initial estimates. It’s working. Security professionals who are tracking the trend now estimate that there could be hundreds of thousands of infected systems around the world, making this a quietly growing threat that has, until now, gone largely unnoticed.
Suppose that wasn’t bad enough, and given that the hackers know that gamers tend to be tech-savvy, Hackers specifically target gamers designing the malware. In that case, they’re using against them to actively evade detection, making them notoriously hard to pin down on an infected system.
All that to say, if you are a gamer and you enjoy making use of cheat codes to shortcut the time it would otherwise take to master the game, be aware. Hackers all over the planet target gamers like you. It seems nothing, and no one is safe these days.
