Aug 08, 2022 11:35:00

37% of all DDoS attacks target the game industry, and 'Among Us' and 'Sky Star Spinning Children' are also affected

A large number of

DDoS attacks , which send a huge amount of traffic to the attack target server and make it unprocessable, are carried out in a wide range of fields such as government agencies and companies. A new report released by cloud security giant Akamai reported that 37% of the DDoS attacks confirmed between May 2021 and April 2022 targeted the gaming industry.

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DDoS attacks have been widely used for a long time as an attack method that makes the target server inoperable. In July 2017, ' Sky Children who spin the stars ' reported access failures for several days, and in recent years there have been many reports of damage to the game industry due to DDoS attacks.

????Update: Apology for glitches????
We are currently under DDoS attack (distributed denial of service attack). This could be causing latency or connectivity issues.

This situation has been going on for a few days, but we are working to mitigate and resolve the issue, so we appreciate your patience. #thatskygame https://t.co/tAVVLFffhD

— Children spinning Sky stars (@thatskygameJP) July 20, 2022

According to Akamai's report, 821,648,208 web application attacks against the gaming industry were confirmed from May 2021 to April 2022, and the number of attacks increased 167% year-on-year. Also, looking at the targets of DDoS attacks confirmed during the same period, we can see that the industry that was most frequently attacked was the gaming industry (36.81%). The game industry is followed by the financial industry (21.68%), the high-tech industry (20.67%), the manufacturing industry (7.65%), etc., and the number of attacks in the game industry is significantly different from other industries.

Also, looking at the number of web application attacks targeting the game industry by country, the country with the most attacks was the United States, followed by Switzerland, India, Japan, the United Kingdom, Poland, Singapore, and South Korea.

Akamai points out that attacks targeting the game industry are increasing for the purpose of ``acquiring accounts of paying users and long-playing users''. Cyber criminals generally carry out attacks for financial purposes, and in the past, attacks were mainly aimed at stealing credit card numbers and bank account information. However, in recent years, it is said that great value has been found in the account itself of users who have acquired many in-game items by charging and playing for a long time.

Akamai argues that the scale of cyberattacks will increase as more companies expand their Metaverse-related operations, citing the need for cooperation across the security industry to keep users' accounts safe.