As online gaming continues to grow stronger than ever and looks nothing like its origins these days, it has easily added around 4.6 million new gamers in 2019 alone. Yet while the potential is still out there and the entertainment value is excellent, with immersive worlds and global connectivity, it also ends up being a breeding ground for fraudsters and other cyber criminals.
Who are the easy targets?
Children seem to be an easy target, and over a third of parents feel that they will open up sensitive data to potential fraud, based on a recent study Lloyds Bank did.
This is also due to how easy we’ve made it to pay for things through digital technologies. There are even some authorizations for payments that can be earned simply with just an email login and password, leaving it easy for fraudsters to get access to critical data.
How companies can help with security
While there’s a discussion of who is truly responsible, the study by Lloyds Bank has narrowed down the two most common types of crime to identity theft and hacking. That means companies and the gaming platforms they operate can help through various security features.
One such feature is, at the minimum, a two-step authentication system. This helps to digitally verify the correct identification of the user. There are also features coming out where platforms are working on enabling authorization through facial recognition or even liveness detection (to eliminate bot scammers).
Online Platforms to continue their security process
The threat is only going to continue to get worse, and that means more involvement from all sides. Also, implementation of the latest security features, especially biometrics, is critical across all such platforms. The platforms themselves can also get hacked, releasing their user data, and causing serious headaches at the same time.
Biometrics also doesn’t use up a lot of data and can easily be stored in secured cloud computing to be retrieved when necessary. They’re also heavily encrypted, making it hard to try to open and use these files without the right permissions.
Onboarding and verification of such security measures should be relatively simple to ensure that everyone opts in to use it. With these implemented properly, then gamers know that these online platforms take security seriously and focus on environments that are meant to be safe and secure.
Identity verification needs to also be utilized for not just payments but also to access the gaming components themselves, as this will ensure a more enjoyable overall payer experience as they know that their online gaming efforts cannot simply be hacked and altered in any way.
This can also help with any future breaches a company may end up having because digital identity verification for identification and payments needs to approve the next step; the data that ends up being released when stolen will be useless to many. This is because those data points are just a piece of the authentication process.
