By Prateek Tripath
From the emergence of the video game “Pong” in 1972 to the release of “Hogwart’s Legacy” in 2023, the video gaming industry has come a long way. With a revenue of over US$227 billion in 2022, gaming is no longer the niche industry it was once thought to be. The number of gamers in the world is expected to reach a figure of 3.32 billion by 2024. This recent surge in growth has, in a large part, been a result a of the COVID-19 pandemic when the market expanded by about 26 percent between 2019 and 2021.
However, this popular form of recreation has also imperilled cybersecurity. There has been a surge in cyberattacks on the gaming sector, with an increase of 167 percent in web application attacks in 2021 alone. In 2022, the gaming industry became the biggest target of Distributed Denial of Service attacks, accounting for about 37 percent of all such attacks. Account takeovers, cheating mods, credit card theft, and fraud are all issues faced by gamers on a regular basis. The most alarming development, however, was the leaking of secret documents in April 2023 containing confidential US Intelligence on a videogame chat server, in what has come to be described as the worst Pentagon leak in years. This just goes to show how ignorance of this threat could have unforeseen and potentially catastrophic consequences, even from a national security perspective.
Mining Pentagon data
In April 2023, several highly classified documents, some even marked “Top Secret”, were leaked on a Discor ..
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