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Kaspersky Reports Growth in Gamer Cyberattacks in 2023

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The global gaming community, which currently accounts for nearly half of the world’s population, has found itself increasingly under fire by cybercriminals, according to a comprehensive investigation by Kaspersky. In the period spanning from July 2022 to July 2023, the cybersecurity company discovered the growing vulnerability of the gaming user base. Cybercriminals exploited this vast community to access personal data, launching a range of attacks, including web vulnerabilities, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, cryptocurrency mining, and complex Trojan or phishing campaigns.

In the period from July 1, 2022, to July 1, 2023, Kaspersky’s solutions detected a substantial 4,076,530 attempts to download 30,684 unique files masked as popular games, mods, cheats, and other game-related software. These incidents affected 192,456 users worldwide. These files – primarily classified as unwanted software and often labelled as not-a-virus:Downloader (89.7%), – are not innately perilous, but they are capable of downloading various other programs, even malicious ones, onto the user’s device. Adware (5.3%) and Trojans (2.4%) were also noteworthy threats to desktop gamers.

Minecraft emerged as the favoured target among cybercriminals, responsible for triggering 70.3% of all alerts. The threats using Minecraft as bait impacted 130,619 players across the globe during the reporting period. Roblox was the second most targeted game title, contributing to 20.4% of all alerts affecting 30,367 users. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (4.8%), PUBG (2.9%), Hogwarts Legacy (0.6%), DOTA 2 (0.5%), and League of Legends (0.3%) were also among the prominent games subjected to cyber threats.

The mobile gaming community, which, according to the Newzoo 2023 report consists of over three billion gamers or nearly 40% of the world’s population, is characterized by its significant growth and accessibility and has become an enticing target for cybercriminals. Between July 1, 2022, and July 1, 2023, Kaspersky documented 436,786 attempts to infect mobile devices, impacting 84,539 users.

Various game titles were employed as bait to target mobile gamers. Minecraft enthusiasts once again were the primary targets, as 90.4% of attacks focused on the 80,128 gamers who fell victim. Indonesian users in particular faced exploitation through Minecraft, resulting in a Trojan.AndroidOS.Pootel.a attack, discreetly registering mobile subscriptions. Iran witnessed the highest prevalence of these attacks, with 140,482 alerts impacting 54,467 Minecraft players.

PUBG: Battlegrounds Battle Royale, was the second most exploited mobile game among cybercriminals, accounting for 5.09% of all alerts, with the majority of incidents originating from Russian Federation users. Roblox (3.33%) ranked third in terms of detections but second in the number of affected users.

A noteworthy discovery involves the emergence of SpyNote, a spy Trojan distributed among Roblox users on the Android mobile platform under the guise of a mod. This Trojan exhibits various spying capabilities, including keylogging, screen recording, video streaming from phone cameras, and the ability to impersonate Google and Facebook applications to deceive users into divulging their passwords.

Phishing and counterfeit distribution pages continue to pose a significant threat to gamers. Malicious and undesired software often masquerades as popular games, disseminated through third-party websites offering pirated versions. These deceptive pages typically display inflated download counts, potentially misleading users into a false sense of security. Nonetheless, clicking the download button typically results in an archive that may contain harmful or unrelated elements, diverging from the promised content.

“In the dynamic gaming industry, which hosts a wealth of personal and financial data, cybercriminals are seizing enticing opportunities. They exploit gaming accounts by pilfering in-game assets, and virtual currency, and selling compromised gaming accounts, often with real-world value. The relentless pursuit of personal data has led to a surge in ransomware attacks, even affecting professional gamers who depend on uninterrupted play. This underscores the critical need for enhanced cybersecurity awareness within the gaming community,” comments Vasily Kolesnikov, a cybersecurity expert at Kaspersky.

To stay safe while gaming, here are some recommendations:

  • It is safer to download your games from official stores like Steam, Apple App Store, Google Play or Amazon Appstore only. Games from these markets are not 100 % secure, but at least they are checked by store representatives and there is some kind of screening process: not every app can be made available in these stores.
  • If you wish to buy a game that is not available through the main stores, purchase it from the official website only. Double-check the URL of the website and make sure it is authentic.
  • Beware of phishing campaigns and unfamiliar gamers. Do not open links received by email or in a game chat unless you trust the sender. Do not open files you get from strangers.
  • Do not download pirated software or any other illegal content, even if you are redirected to it from a legitimate website.
  • A strong, reliable security solution will be a great help to you, especially if it will not slow down your computer while you are playing, but at the same time, it will protect you from all possible cyber threats.
  • Use a robust security solution to protect yourself from malicious software and its activity on mobile devices.

Cyber Security

Databases Are the Black Boxes for Most Organisations

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Nik Koutsoukos, the Vice President of SolarWinds, says databases represent the most difficult ecosystems to observe, tune, manage, and scale

Tell us about the SolarWinds database observability platform.
Nearly everything a modern business does from a digital perspective requires data. Thus, databases are among the enterprise’s most valuable IT assets. This makes it critical for organisations to ensure their databases are optimised for performance and cost.

That said, databases represent the most difficult ecosystems to observe, tune, manage, and scale. Not only are there different types of databases that serve different purposes, but they are also populated by different types of data, adding to their complexity. The implications of not having visibility into your databases can be anywhere from a costly annoyance to a significant issue that causes business service disruption. For example, most application performance issues, between 70% and 88%, are rooted in the database.

For this reason, databases have largely been seen as a black box for most organisations. You know what goes into it. And you know what comes out and how long that took. However, the complexities that occur within the black box of the database are harder to discern.

This is where the SolarWinds Database Observability comes in. This offering is built for the needs of the modern enterprise environment and helps ensure optimal performance by providing full, unified visibility and query-level workload monitoring across centralised, distributed, cloud-based, and on-premises databases. Organisations armed with SolarWinds Database Observability enhance their ability to understand database implications as new code is deployed, utilise real-time troubleshooting of database performance issues, and isolate unusual behaviour and potential issues within the database.

How does database observability help IT teams track and manage infrastructure, applications, and possible threats?
Database observability collects data about the performance, stability, and overall health of an organisation’s monitored databases to address and prevent issues, and provides deep database performance monitoring to drive speed, efficiency, and savings. With SolarWinds Observability — which supports MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server database instances — database performance, responsiveness, and error rate are conveniently displayed in dashboards.

Moreover, alerts can be configured to notify admins by email or other methods when user-defined thresholds are crossed. This allows them to identify and remedy issues before they can develop. By gaining insight into the activities taking place inside their database instances, teams can understand user experience as well as ensure systems can scale to meet demand.

What sort of enhancements has your observability platform received recently?
Just this November, we announced major enhancements in the Database Observability capability within our cloud-based SolarWinds Observability platform. SolarWinds Database Observability provides full visibility into open-source, cloud-enabled, and NoSQL databases to identify and address costly and critical threats to their systems and business. It is now possible to navigate across all of the samples collected globally, giving IT teams an empirical distribution of random samples, which resembles the main workload.

What factors according to you will drive the adoption of observability tools in the MEA region?
The Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa (META) are riding a wave of rampant digital transformation as organisations seek to remain competitive. According to IDC, digital transformation spending in the Middle East will accelerate at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16% over the five-year period, topping US$74 billion in 2026 and accounting for 43.2% of all ICT investments made that year. As organisations continue to shift workloads to multi- and hybrid-cloud environments, the complexity of their IT environments still continues to increase. This raises the potential for visibility and monitoring gaps which ultimately translate to underwhelming or outright frustrating experiences for end users.

Tell us about the top three trends you foresee for 2024.
There are clear signs of the continued adoption of cloud technologies to allow enterprises to become more agile, giving engineering teams the ability to focus on their core competencies and expand and contract on demand.

The adoption of Kubernetes is also increasing as the refocusing introduced by the cloud enables the move to microservices-based architectures which require sophisticated orchestration management.

Finally, we are starting to see an uptick in Vector databases, as applications demand better handling of relationships between data points.

What is going to be your top priority in terms of strategies for 2024?
We will continue to deliver on our vision of making observability easy. OpenTelemetry is driving observability, but data collection is nothing if it can’t provide insights. So, we aim to ensure the data is both collected and curated such that users find it easy to consume and extract valuable insight.

Regionally, through 2024, we will continue to focus on our key markets of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the ongoing enhancement of our product portfolio, and the strengthening of our channel ecosystem to create more markets for our business and for our partners.

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Cyber Security

ManageEngine Intros Enhanced SIEM with Dual-Layered System for Better Precision in Threat Detection

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ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation, today unveiled the industry’s first dual-layered threat detection system in its security information and event management (SIEM) solution, Log360. The new feature, available in Log360’s threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) component, Vigil IQ, empowers security operations centre (SOC) teams in organizations with improved accuracy and enhanced precision in threat detection.

A quality SOC ensures people, processes, and cutting-edge technology function well. However, enterprise security is made difficult by staffing shortages and solution orchestration complexities. Following recent upgrades to the security analytics module of Log360 designed to facilitate SOC optimization through key performance metric monitoring, the company has focused on addressing pressing challenges in security operations.

“In a recent ManageEngine study, a majority of respondents revealed that their SOCs are understaffed. These resource-constrained SOCs grapple with significant obstacles, such as process silos and manual investigation of alerts, which are often non-threats, low-priority issues or false positives. These lead to extended detection and response times for actual threats. To overcome these challenges, we recognize the imperative adoption of AI & ML for contextual event enrichment and rewiring threat detection logic,” said Manikandan Thangaraj, vice president at ManageEngine.

“We pioneered a dual-layered, ML approach to heighten the precision and consistency of threat detection. First, Vigil IQ ensures genuine threats are discerned from false positives. Second, the system facilitates targeted threat identification and response. This advanced system significantly improves the accuracy of identifying threats, streamlining the detection process and allowing SOC analysts to focus their valuable time on investigating real threats.”

Key Features of the Dual-Layered Threat Detection System of Vigil IQ in Log360:
Smart Alerts: Vigil IQ, the TDIR module of Log360, now combines the power of both accuracy and precision in threat detection. With its dynamic learning capability, Vigil IQ adapts to the changing nature of network behaviour to cover more threat instances accurately. It will spot threats that get overlooked due to manual threshold settings, thereby improving the detection system’s reliability.

Proactive Predictive Analytics: Leveraging predictive analytics based on historical data patterns, Vigil IQ predicts potential security threats, facilitating the implementation of proactive measures before incidents occur. This predictive intelligence drastically reduces the mean time to detect (MTTD) threats.

Contextual Intelligence: Vigil IQ enriches alerts with deep contextual information, providing security analysts with comprehensive threat insights. This enrichment of alerts with non-event context accelerates the mean time to respond (MTTR) by delivering pertinent, precise information.

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Cyber Security

Cybersecurity on a Budget: Affordable Cybersecurity Strategies for Small Businesses

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According to a survey by Statista, typically, global enterprises dedicate a minimum of 12% of their IT expenditure to information security measures. While larger companies can afford to spend a lot on building a robust cybersecurity strategy, smaller businesses cannot. So, let’s explore some affordable cybersecurity strategies for small businesses that may cost less but have a greater impact.

Train your employees
An article from Forbes found that, annually, 34% of businesses worldwide encounter incidents involving insider attacks. Whether intentional or unintentional, employees tend to be the reason for most data breaches. Per the same article, phishing emails account for 67% of accidental insider attacks.

Phishing attacks mostly instil a sense of urgency in the victim, making it harder for them to think clearly before making a decision. For example, employees may click an email announcement about a bonus that actually came from a malicious outsider impersonating your company’s CEO.

To avoid such mistakes, it’s imperative to train employees on the types of phishing attacks and the ways to identify them. Even going as far as sending a mock phishing email occasionally to test their instincts and educate them can go a long way.

Assess your vulnerabilities
One of the most important cybersecurity strategies is to assess all your risk points by periodically reviewing all your business processes. Pay more attention to teams that deal with a lot of customer data. For instance, sales and marketing teams may handle customer data on a day-to-day basis, so they are at high risk of leaking or mishandling data. Assess their daily activities, create a record of all the risk points, and find ways to mitigate them.

Encrypt your data
Encrypting your data can be an effective method to protect it in case of data leaks. Let’s say a hacker gets hold of your company’s data, but it’s encrypted. Unless the hacker gets the encryption key from you, they cannot access your company’s data. This adds another layer of protection in addition to the everyday cybersecurity best practices that you should be following in your company. So make it a point to encrypt all your data, especially sensitive and critical data.

Limit access to critical data
Not everyone requires access to all data. Try to limit access to critical and sensitive data to fewer employees by basing access on work duties or requiring approval for access, making it a multi-step process to access it. Additionally, periodically review who has access to what data to ensure there aren’t any misallocations of access.

Secure your Wi-Fi
A secure network will reduce the chances of a hack or unauthorized access to your sensitive data. So switch your Wi-Fi to WPA2 or later, as it offers more security. Your business might already be using it, but it’s best to be sure. Additionally, change the name of your SSID and have a strong pre-shared key to keep your Wi-Fi safe from hackers.

Prevent physical theft
Through April 2023, there were 3,785 robberies in London, and 1,765 were of mobile phones. This highlights how important it is to secure your physical assets, as they might contain critical and sensitive information about your organization.

Here are some ways to protect your physical assets, such as PCs, laptops, scanners, and printers:

  1. Restrict unauthorized access to assets.
  2. Install a physical tracker on all devices to track down lost items.
  3. Enable remote wiping of data to erase information if a device is lost.

Cybersecurity strategies are seldom drafted with affordability in mind. However, it is crucial to consider them from a financial perspective, as small businesses are also increasingly susceptible to cyberattacks. These tips can help you take the first step toward creating a secure IT environment. Learn more about cybersecurity solutions for your business.

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