According to some projections, it is estimated that the global games industry will grow by about 11%, that is, 209 billion dollars approximately, however, this promising sector of technology faces piracy where significant sums of money can be lost.
Pirating a video game consists of “cracking” it so that anyone can use it, thus bypassing digital rights management, however, downloading a pirated video game is no longer as easy as getting it on CD, since many times the risks are greater than the advantages of trying to install a cracked title. These are some of the consequences.
malware
One technique that has worked very well for cybercriminals is spread malware through apparent gameswhat they actually do is use the name of a famous game and phrases related to downloads or free content to capture the attention of Internet users.
Normally, these types of publications that promise popular free video games are found on social networks, they are sent as messages to Whatsapp or They even rank very well in browser search results, making people believe that they are legitimate sites.
Cybercriminals usually design their malicious software to be able to evade computer security systems, but as part of their plan they can even ask the potential victim to disable the computer’s antivirus so that the alleged download of the game can be run.
As a curious fact, a study from 2021 showed that in a period of two years around 3 million computers were infected with a Trojan-type virus that was hidden in one of these pirate game campaigns carried out by the attackers, on that occasion The criminals managed to steal more than a million email addresses and 26 million passwords and usernames to access different types of platforms.
Types of malware that are commonly spread by pirated games include:
cryptocurrency malware
These are used to use infected computers as cryptocurrency miners without any type of permission or knowledge on the part of the owner, consuming the power of the devices’ processor and even being able to completely damage them.
Banking Trojans
As their name says, they were created to steal financial data from people and entities.
Keyloggers
These computer viruses have the ability to identify the keys that users typeso in this way the access codes to personal email accounts, banks and other types of entities are stolen.
Ransomware
These malware can steal and hijack the data contained in a computer or block access to it and then ask the victim for money in exchange for returning access to the systems.
botnet
With this virus, the computer will be completely lost, as the attackers will take full control of it to carry out more attacks on other users on the web.
Adware
Eset warns that this is not as dangerous as malware, but it will be very annoying to the computer or cell phone user, since it will flood them with invasive and static advertising, thus limiting the possibilities of using the device.
In the year 2020, Google had to remove 21 games from its official app store that contained these malware-generating adware. intrusive advertising and sometimes with explicit content.
The game will not work as expected
You may have been lucky that no virus was downloaded to your device when you tried to install a pirated game, but possibly the title will not work correctlyit will never open, it will be incomplete, or it will not be compatible with the computer’s operating system.
Getting banned from video game platforms
This is especially the case with video game consoles, as their developers have the ability to track pirated software and identify which device it is on, blacklisting it along with the account linked to the server.
Receive an unwanted visit from the police
It’s not a secret that downloading different pirate programs is the daily bread on the Internet, even the majority of Internet users have had to do it at some point and they haven’t gone to jail for it. But over the years, the rules regarding these practices have been tightening and it would be very unfortunate that a “well-behaved citizen” has to be held accountable for this situation.
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