How To Protect Your Gaming Accounts From Hackers

You’re supposed to relax and enjoy yourself when playing video games. You’re not supposed to worry about getting hacked or losing sensitive data.

But anything you do online exposes you to the risk of identity theft and other cybercrimes. North America makes up over a quarter of the gaming market. The U.S. video game market alone generated $34.5 billion in revenues last year.

Those numbers are great for the economy and the companies making money. But it’s also a growing opportunity for hackers to commit crimes against gamers.

The methods for protecting your gaming accounts is, in most ways, similar to those for protecting your other online accounts like email, banking and social media accounts.

Hackers tend to seek one of the following when targeting gaming accounts:

• Financial information – You buy games and make in-game purchases using your credit or debit accounts. Hackers can make purchases under your name once they take over your account.
• Personal information – Hackers can use your name, address, and birthday to commit all kinds of crimes. Your compromised account becomes a risk for identity theft.
• In-game items – Serious gamers spend real cash on in-game items, including weapons and armor. You lose real money when you lose these items to hackers.

Here are the measures you can take to protect your gaming accounts from hackers:

Use Unbreakable Passwords

Using complex passwords is crucial to staying safe while playing online games. A strong password takes very long for hackers to crack. The difficulty forces criminals to move on to their next target.

With password protection software, you don’t need to memorize unique keyphrases. It generates strong passwords and saves them for you. They are convenient but powerful enough to keep you safe. They have encryption features and warn you of possible data breaches.

Beware of Phishing Attempts

Most video gaming accounts allow users to communicate with other players. It makes planning and coordination easy when playing team-based games. But this feature also leaves online gamers vulnerable to phishing attacks.

Observe best practices for averting phishing attempts. Be wary of messages from senders you don’t know or…