One of the best highlights of Kaspersky Cyber Security Week 2025 happens to be Polina Tretyak’s presentation on how she shares about the threats that happen in the world of gaming. With a catchy title, “You may not rest, there are monsters nearby.” – this thirty-minute presentation and personally talking to her has given us so many insights to share. So, here’s all about that.
Kaspersky Cyber Security Week 2025: Polina Tretyak
The Reason why ASEAN is the Prime Target
According to Newzoo’s Global Games Market Report 2024, there are more than 3.42 billion gamers worldwide, and this number is only expected to increase. But what comes off as a surprise is that more than half the percentage, which is 53% to be exact – are players from the APAC region – and we are talking about countries like Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and the list goes on. Because of this major percentage of players, if you are from the APAC region, well, it’s a little hard to run away from it.
In that, based on Kaspersky’s 2024 data, it has come to light that – of all thee Game clients, Steam happens to be the hottest among the bunch – with 5,699,771 compromises in 2024 and that’s an increase of 191,196 more accounts than 2023.
And when you look at the chart, you’ll realize that in the top 10 countries: Thailand is affected the most, followed by Philippines, Vietnam, India and the list goes on. Not to forget, Malaysia in the Top 6th, something that isn’t worth being proud of. But there’s a huge reason why, we have such compromises.
It has to do with InfoStealers
Now you may not know who are these InfoStealers, but as the name suggests, they are great at stealing information from those “free skins and stuff” you downloaded from those random MediaFire link. Which brings us to the point that, the three most popular games for this incident happens to be: Minecraft, ROBLOX and Fortnite. Now you might go, “I get free skins, so, what the matter – its not like they know what I do.” – well, that’s where you are terribly wrong.
Cybercriminals, that uses these ways to get into your system use Malware log files to extrapolate the data like your credit cards, passwords and the list goes on from your games and potentially, hack and sell it onto the darkweb. Now, apps like Steam does have ways to monitor and make sure to avoid suspicious log files but there is still a high chance that it can bypass the checker and successfully plant itself to start stealing the data.
Because of this, and once it is successfully achieved, the valuable items you have in your account like that special gun skin that costs a pretty penny, character skins and the list goes on – gets sold and compromised. Since the beginning of 2024, 94 checkers were distributed by cybercriminals – which is ridiculously high. But there’s a catch…
These Log Files don’t live for long…
So tracing them, isn’t the easiest either. And the moment they obtain information such as Logins, Credentials and Cookies which is a famous technique at this point, they authenticate through the targeted stolen account and will sell these skins, transfer the money to attacker accounts. But you might wonder, what are they going to do with this money?
Well, this becomes the Currency for Bigger Problems
Have you ever seen where some random dude would go, “Hey, I have this much money in my Steam account and I’d like to sell games with 10-15% off” on Facebook groups? While not all of them embark on these scummy ways, but this is how they turn the “digital currency” into physical currency. You would have paid RM 50 for a game, and you would have received the game via Steam Gifting – which is legitimate – however, what we did not know is how we actually make these Cybercriminals, properly cash rich. Indirectly, we did help them.
That’s not all – this is also how you see those cheap Gift Card codes that go around for sale, which is another way on how they convert their “digital currency” into a “physical currency”.
Is there a way to be safe from this?
There is, but it isn’t something you don’t know – in fact, changing the password for instance when it was compromised and using your cybersecurity software to run a diagnostics to find out of it works or not, helps a lot. Not just that, in order to mitigate the Infostealer infection, Polina recommends to have an endpoint protection system which detects, blocks and cures malware, maintain a strict password policy and to stay vigilant.
Afterall, it’s in your hands to be safe. So, don’t look for those free skins online or pirated content – save up and get games, or maybe save even more by purchasing during major Steam sales.
This is a developing story – stay tuned for the interview material, which will be uploaded to this article.
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