Privacy, Security & Virus Information

Online gamers face attacks

Online gamers face attacks from their virtual enemies with bravery, intelligence and flair, but when it comes to facing attacks from online criminals, they sometimes don't have the same approach.

The online gaming community is growing rapidly and individual gamers, despite being highly proficient and computer literate, have been shown to sometimes have a cavalier attitude when it comes to protecting themselves against attack bugs and viruses.

If you take the average online gamer, they tend to have high-end equipment, good Internet links, money for game buying and subscription based game sites, and also be online for great amounts of time.

This is the ideal profile for an online criminal, who would love to exploit these so-called attributes.

And add to this the gamer's habit of turning off their online protection software, in order to maximise their computer processing power so as to maintain speed during the game, and they are increasingly being targeted with viruses, malware and phishing.

So, okay, the threat from not running your internet security programme in the background is obvious to most people, but how come such computer savvy users are vulnerable to attack?

Simply because the average online gamer is forever buying and downloading various add-ons to the game, whether official, or unofficial, which either heightens the game enjoyment, or increases the users speed at playing th game. Such an add-on might optimise the game interface, or create, or modify exist game weapons. Now, if this enhancements are coming from official, or bona fida sources, then no problem, but lets say a gamer opts to download an add-on from a bogus source, and one which promises regular updates for his favourite game? This is the entrance for the internet criminal, who once sees the front door is open and the gamer's guard is down, can then start to infiltrate that person's computer will all sorts of manner of bugs and malware.

They are also under threat from phishing emails, which promises gamers all sorts of benefits if they use a particular service. And these emails will usually appear very legitimate and official, coaxing the unwary onto sites that will eventual begin to attack their gaming systems.

As with all security threats, the best thing a gamer can be is very suspicious of every offered downloads. Unless they can verify the source via official web-sites, or other games via chat rooms, then they would do well to stay clean.

Also, there are new internet security programmes being introduced that are specially designed to help the game stay safe, while playing at maximum power. They have been designed to take up the least amount of processing power, while staying alert in the background.

Online gamers beware; it's not only the virtual alien with the mean looking weapon that might represent a threat!

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