Game industry: Security reports are not possible

Gamers have also been hit by cybercrime, mainly through voucher and phishing attacks. Akamai observed more than 100 billion credential attacks from July 2018 to June 2020, nearly 10 billion of which targeted the gaming industry. To carry out such attacks, criminals attempt to access games and gaming services through malicious websites and a combined list of purchased usernames and passwords. Each successful login indicates that the player's account has been broken.

Phishing is another major form of attack against gamers. In this way, hackers create websites related to games or gaming platforms in order to trick players into revealing their login credentials.

From July 2018 to June 2020, Akamai detected 10.6 billion cyber-application attacks, more than 152 million of which were directed at the gaming industry. Most of these are SQL injection attacks that target user login credentials, personal data, and other information stored in the server database. Local File Inclusion (LFI) is another noteworthy attack vector.

Akamai observed more than 3,000 of the 5,600 DDoS attacks between July 2019 and June 2020, making gaming the industry most likely to be attacked by DDoS. In addition, game-related DDoS attacks can surge during holidays and in special times, such as school holidays.

Although many gamers have been hacked, few seem to be worried. 55 per cent of respondents described themselves as "regular game players", with 55 per cent admitting that their account had been broken at some point. However, only 20 per cent of these people were "worried" or "very worried".

The Akamai/DreamHack survey also found that gamers see security as a team effort, with 54 percent of respondents admitting to past hacking as a shared responsibility between gamers and game developers/companies.