Mobile games are definitely among the preferred apps of smartphone users. More and more people are using and playing games on the mobile today. The graph of popularity of these games is on constant expansion. Though all of this sounds quite charming, the gaming company owners as well as developers must also accept the reality that there lies the clear threat of cybersecurity. Perhaps, it is the reason why mobile game security is so important and necessary.
In fact, the risk is so massive that the whole gaming industry reported billions of credential stuffing attacks in the last few years. Despite such types of alarming statistics, most mobile game developers don’t really understand realize how much influence these security risks can have on their general revenue as per as their reputation.
General threats in Gaming Apps & Solutions
Once you are talking about gaming applications, they have a rather pricy threat landscape owing to the diversity of gaming platforms and complicated architecture. It is the reason securing a gaming application can be absolutely a huge challenge. Here, have a look at some of the threats below:
Reverse Engineering as well as Malware
The games that receive much higher popularity than the others are even more vulnerable to reverse engineering attacks as well as malware infection. The fundamental art, game assets, code, and even data assets of the game can get reverse-engineered by the hackers or attackers and repackaged to get launched in the market as a copy. Most of these types of cloned games are ill with malware too and would circuitously influence the reputation of the original game. It is time that you pay attention to your gaming app security or you may be the next victim of an attacker. Once you lose the reputation, it could be a great stain for your journey in this industry.
Faults with the In-App Purchasing System
Though most of the mobile games depend heavily on in-app purchases for their healthy revenues, most of these purchasing systems include serious security flaws that allow hackers to gain access to add-on items and gaming functionalities absolutely for free. So, you have no idea how faults can turn out to be disastrous for you.
Piracy as well as Unauthorized Installations
There is massive of third-party stores for mobile apps across the world and most of them offer Android applications. App developers are mostly lured by these app stores so that they might cash in higher revenues. What happens, in the reality , is that these untrusted app stores even host the pirated or even cloned type of versions of the apps (mainly games). These false apps not just contain malware but even deny any sort of revenue to the actual game developers. Some mobile game developers even have reported piracy rates as high as ninety percent for their overall games. Now that you do understand what really the underlying security risks are, you must also know what steps should be taken so as to secure the mobile gaming applications.
Guarding the payment gateways
Even the least of the errors in your in-app purchase system might end up in the loss of millions of pennies for your business. You can system intrusion detection on the perimeter in front of the application backend to simply recognize critical points in your payment system and even use code obfuscation methods to make it challenging for the hackers to get the overall access to your systems.
Such moves are not only going to secure your payment system but even get you ample time to react in the times of a breach. Since even obfuscated code may get decoded by modern automated tools, it will be a better practice to make use of clean programming techniques and depend on proper application infrastructure.
Secure the Code
Unimpeded code leads to mobile malware infecting the entire application infrastructure. This triggers bugs and vulnerabilities in the game and mostly this point gets neglected by the developers. There have been different reports that mentioned that malicious code is influencing more than millions of mobile devices at a given time and the numbers are unfortunately probable to grow manifold in the impending future.
The point is simple, developers must methodically evaluate their code so as to detect and respond to the vulnerabilities. This would immune their overall gaming apps against the existing security threats such as injection attacks and reverse engineering and definitely avert malicious apps from getting circulated in the market.
Promises Device security
Similarly important to secure code is the overall security of the underlying device. Depending on the infrastructure of the app, the developers requires to come up with ways to check and even ensure the security of the host device. One of the main things a developer must definitely check is if the app sandbox is intact in the mobile’s operating system or even not. The devices that have been rooted pose a massive threat as their security model could have been disrupted because of jailbreaking.
Attackers might also utilize the excess permissions given to applications and push their malware to include basic accesses like SMS as well as contacts and use them for fake activities. Overall, the security of your gaming app even depends on the degree of security that gets maintained by the users on their devices.
Avert Memory Hacking
The strategy adopted by free-to-play games is to simply introduce in-app purchases of certain types of items that enable players to perform better or pass specific obstacles faster. Memory hacking just isolates the storage point of such items and gives the hacker access to unlimited in-game cash or even gold.
In most of the mobile games in the present time the actions get performed by a player get recorded on the local device itself and even batched up before getting transmitted to the server. This is something that averts network lag and makes the gaming experience absolutely better. This allows the hackers to use memory hacking tools and even target the item batches and attach the modification tool to get the access to the memory and at times in-app payments of the app. However, such a thing can get prevented by detecting any sort of attempt of external memory modification and even responding to it.
Conclusion
To sum up, Gaming security is one thing that you should not miss out on or you may be at the verge of losing your reputation and a great financial budget too!