Fortnite is becoming one of the biggest online games in the world, however the more it seems to grow and expand, the more hackers are attracted to the platform.
Earlier this month it was reported that players have been losing ‘so much money’ after hackers were infiltrating their accounts and racking up ‘charges [worth] hundreds of dollars’, according to Kotaku.
Its surge in popularity has made it a prime target for cyber criminals, and now security experts Kaspersky Lab are asking players to stay vigilant online.
Principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, David Emm, has given advice to gamers about how they can stay safe after the hack attacks.
In a statement (via Daily Star) he said: ‘The gaming industry is hugely lucrative, and with over half of players regularly gaming online, it’s also becoming an increasingly attractive target for cyber criminals. However, many online gamers don’t take precautions to reflect this.
‘According to Kaspersky Lab research, just five per cent of people selected their gaming account as being one of three that require the strongest passwords.’
His advice continue, as he referenced gamers using ‘less secure’ options like the same password for all their accounts, or an easily-guessed one.
‘However, only by taking appropriate precautions and using strong, unique passwords will people be confident that their valuable accounts are protected and that all their efforts have not gone to waste,’ he said. ‘In addition, gamers should protect their computers and not disable features for fear of them interfering with their gameplay.’
Fortnite’s developer Epic Games also warned fans to stay safe online and released a guide telling them what to do.
‘At Epic, we’ve been working hard to try to hunt down password dumps in order to proactively reset passwords for player accounts when we believe they are leaked online,’ the statement said. ‘While this approach involves a lot of manual work on our side, we believe that it prevents a significant amount of fraud.
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‘However, this approach doesn’t find every impacted account, or you might have created your Epic account after we checked a particular password dump.’
They added: ‘As a result, we’re working to further automate our process to check our account database against password dumps to close the gap on identifying impacted users and resetting their passwords.’
Now, go forth and play, securely and safely!
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