Kaspersky Lab's latest report on internet security finds that gamersare amongst the highest affected web users, with over 7,000 infection attempts per day targetting them in 2012. There are several methodologies used bythe cyber-criminals and scam artists, from phishing to direct browser-based attacks. You can read the report in its entirety below:According to data from KSN*, Kaspersky Lab experts recorded 7,000 attempts to infect gamers around the world every day in 2012. These attacks are launched in an attempt to gain access to personal user data, such as passwords to online games and online banking systems. Where games are concerned, malicious users attempt to steal avatars and in-game items to subsequently sellthese virtual goods for real money. In the case of online banking, cybercriminals aim to steal money directly from real bank accounts.As Kaspersky Lab experts discovered, in order to do this, malicious users send an average of10 emails with malicious links and attachments to gamers every day, in addition to making roughly 500 attempts to infect gamers via browser-based attacks. What’s more, the company’s “collection” of malicious programs targeting online games is increasing at a rate of 5,000 new programs a day.One of malicious users’ most favored tactics in the world of online games is, of course, social engineering — phishing in particular. For example, cybercriminals invoke the names of well-known gaming worlds and desperately try to lure gamers to their fake websites in order to harvest passwords from registeredgaming accounts. In 2012, Kaspersky Lab experts recorded 15million attempted visits to phishing websites designed to looklike the pages of one of the largestdevelopers of online games. As it turns out, there were up to 50,000attempted redirects to phishing sites each day. Fortunately, all of these trusting users were saved bythe professional anti-phishing system built into Kaspersky Internet Security, which promptly detected the threat.
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