The video game has come a long way since the home hobbyist days of the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum. Eight-bit follies developed in the bedroom have given way to 32-bit masterpieces – and the games themselves aren’t the only thing to have evolved. Criminal activity in the video game market has grown, and changed.
What was a cottage industry is now a global one. Gartner puts the size of the global video game market at $101.6bn in 2014, up from $79bn in 2012. By 2015, it will top $111bn, the analyst firm says. But where revenues are high, cybercrime will surely follow.
Pirates Drop Anchor
Piracy is often mentioned by those exploring cybercrime in the games industry, because it has been a traditional problem. In the early days of computing, video games were almost entirely distributed on magnetic or optical media that was then cracked by pirate groups.These cracker teams evolved from pre-internet BBS hobby groups, who would disassemble game code to remove software copy protection, before uploading it to ‘elite’ back-room sections of piracy BBSs and web chat rooms, or distributing it physically.
One of the earliest cracker groups was Razor 1911, which is still cracking games today. These days, cracked games are distributed mostly via peer-to-peer networks.
Game piracy is still a healthy criminal industry online, although less so than some industry groups would have us believe, according to researchers at MIT. They surveyed networks using the BitTorrent protocol, and found that 12.6 million unique networked peers from 250 geographical areas were sharing games.
There is a heavy concentration of titles and geography. Just over 40% of piracy focused on ten titles, and three quarters of piracy came from just 20 countries.
This game code often gets stolen from the source, rather than cracked after release. In July 2014, Dell SecureWorks identified TG–3279, a Chinese group that it said has been infiltrating videogame development companies since 2009.
TG–3279 used traditionally well-understood penetration techniques, including the use of network scanning to profile its targets, and the installation of remote access tools (RATs) to gain access to specific machines. SecureWorks said that the group could be stealing the source code for several reasons, including piracy, or in order to use the source code in competing products
