Hackers have concentrated all their strength on new gaming consoles

A new generation of game consoles came with the arrival of the Xbox One and Playstation 4, and talented hackers from all over the world immediately took over. But now we are not talking about attempts to launch pirated images of games on consoles, but only about hacking personal PSN and Xbox Live accounts of their owners.

As a result of research conducted by Kaspersky Lab employees, it was found that, on average, more than 34,000 hacker attacks per day are committed to game console owners around the world. The number of attacks has risen sharply since the start of sales of new Xbox One and Playstation 4 game consoles in November of this year.

Also, security experts from Kaspersky Lab told reporters that today they know about 4.6 million different malicious programs specifically designed for game consoles. Hackers from Spain are especially active in this regard. Last year alone, Spanish cyber hooligans carried out more than 140,000 attacks on game consoles. Polish hackers, who are in the ranking in an honorable second place, made about 130,000 attacks in a year, and Italy is in third place with 75,000 attempts to break into other people's accounts.

“In November, we witnessed the largest launches of new consoles in the history of the gaming industry. I'm talking about Xbox One and Playstation 4. And this means only that many new targets have appeared for criminals on the Net, given that both consoles are actively using the Internet to enrich the gaming experience. Of course, you shouldn’t forget about the PC, which is the most attractive platform for hacker hacking to this day, ”said David Emm, head of research at Kaspersky Lab, to journalists.

The main purpose of hackers is to attempt to steal the username and password of users of the set-top boxes. After a successful theft, the information is usually sold to the side. Most often, the users themselves are attacked directly, but in rare cases there are massive attacks on companies that support network services like PSN and Xbox Live. We all remember how in 2011 the Playstation Network Internet service was hacked, which resulted in data stolen about about 77 million user accounts. As a result of this well-organized attack, Sony had to turn off this service for almost a month in order to completely rewrite some of its security-related code.

Based on: digitaltrends.com

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