Scams against gamers steal accounts and rare items

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Hackers are accused of scams against gamers by stealing victims' accounts and reselling rare items.
By Renato Rodrigues
Hackers are targeting users of online gaming platforms , breaking into their accounts and reselling their rare items on the black market. We have identified at least four families of malware capable of collecting sensitive player data from sites such as Battle.net, Origin and Uplay. By operating silently, these files attack victims’ devices without them noticing.

Also known as stealers , Trojans programmed to greece mobile database information provide criminals with various types of data saved on the attacked devices. Game session tokens, logins or passwords, for example, are captured and later resold. Hackers' monetization, however, is not limited to trading stolen accounts: digital bank passwords are also in their sights.

Our experts have identified four families of Trojans targeting online platform players. One of them is the Kpot Trojan, which, in addition to stealing cookie files and accounts from messaging applications, provides criminals with game session tokens, which allow them to capture and resell attributes to other users of these platforms.

Other samples, such as Okasidis and Thief Stealer, focus on stealing specific files from game-related folders on the infected computer.

BetaBot, on the other hand, acts as a browser password retriever. According to our experts, this malware targets several popular gaming platforms in the following way: if a user visits a web address containing specific keywords, the malware will activate data collection from these pages. This will allow passwords and logins entered on the page to fall into the hands of criminals. An important detail: all the observed Trojans operate silently, without issuing alerts or prompts to the victim, thus preventing the device owner from even realizing that they are being attacked. Kaspersky experts also emphasize that the mentioned malware does not exploit any platform vulnerabilities, focusing only on collecting data from infected devices.

“There are many threats focused on games, from fake files to pirated games to be able to use them without paying, and many phishing attacks . However, to protect data, the user needs to be aware that they are being attacked – which is not the case with stealers , who are very difficult to identify. That is why games need to take precautions against these attacks. In addition to taking safe measures, it is also recommended to always use a reliable cybersecurity solution, which prevents the computer from being infected. I recommend Kaspersky Internet Security , as we offer the ' gamer mode ' function, which freezes routine tasks so that processing can be fully dedicated to the game”, comments Santiago Pontiroli, security analyst at Kaspersky in Latin America.