Combating Threats and Vulnerabilities In Online Gaming [Video]

At a recent webinar, “Protect Your Gaming Infrastructure from Hackers and Competitors,” hosted by Imperva Incapsula, journalist Charlie Hall informed participants that almost all electronic gaming now happens online.

Nabeel Saeed, Product Marketing Manager, Incapsula co-hosted the webinar. He spoke about what gaming companies can do to protect their infrastructure and customers. Watch the webinar recording below for the full presentation on how to protect gaming servers from getting hacked.

Understanding the gaming landscape

These days whether you are on computer, tablet, console, or smartphone, if you are playing a game, chances are it was downloaded from the Internet.

Convenient, yes, but the Internet can be a hazardous place.

In the gaming world, the Internet provides easy access to online distribution, multiplayer, microtransactions and authentication. But it also represents a big risk in each of these very vital, fundamental areas. Hackers use the Internet to easily deploy distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Gaming platforms under attack again

The average DDoS attack lasts for about 11 hours and costs about $500,000 to fix. While this amount is substantial, there are other intangible costs involved.

Gaming depends on instantaneous responses and is extremely sensitive to latency. Even a half-second delay can render a game unplayable. Any kind of disruption to its availability causes users to leave the game, taking their money with them as they head to an uncompromised gaming competitor. In addition to potential lost revenues, this also leads to bad press and tainted viability of the game itself.

Unfortunately, security analysts agree that DDoS attacks will continue to grow both in volume and intensity.

How to protect your gaming infrastructure

Multi-layered DDoS protection is an effective solution for gaming companies. When evaluating your vendor, some important criteria to look for in a solution include:

• The ability to secure custom protocols that aren’t HTTP/S-based

• BGP-enabled protection

• Minimal or no latency

• Ability to prevent any attacks of any size

If you don’t own an entire C-class subnet, look for network layer DDoS protection for a single IP address.

View the complete “Protect Your Gaming Infrastructure from Hackers and Competitors” webinar for a lively discussion about the issues affecting online gaming security.

If you have any questions for us on gaming security, DDoS protection, BGP-routing or IP Protection, we’d love to hear from you in our comments or email us.