Online Gamers Beware: Several Gaming Sites Found to Spread Malware
Online gaming has become more desired than emails within the past years. For the month of June of this year alone, a Nielson study found that a larger percentage of computer users spent more time playing games than checking their emails. The increase in popularity of online gaming presents an even greater risk to online gamers because a number of online-gaming-related websites have been found to spread malware.
Computer online gaming has become very popular not only among teen computer users but among adults, who indulge in the sometimes 'stress relieving' activity of playing an online game. Cybercriminals are aware of this very thing and it has lead to security researchers to uncover several online gaming websites ridden with malware. The cybercriminals are intentionally lacing gaming-related sites with malware to spread among computer users who may have poor security protection (anti-virus, anti-spyware applications) or none at all.
The business of online gaming has turned into an estimated USD$15 billion market. To support such a vast market, as you can only imagine, there are many different types of websites created to help online gamers by providing specific online gaming tips, downloads and even chat discussions on gaming community forums. In the recent months, security vendor Avast has uncovered 6 game-related websites, listed below, that were found to spread malware.
Gaming-related web sites recently discovered to spread malware
- anywhere-games.com
- galacticflashgames.com
- gamefactoryinteractive.com
- games-digest.com
- mariogamesplay.com
- towerofdefense.com
Many of the sites listed above were laced with malware to attack online gamers who may have disabled their anti-virus or anti-spyware application to play a game. You may ask, why would someone disable their anti-virus or anti-spyware software to play an online game? It is rather simple. By disabling an anti-virus or anti-spyware application on a computer, it will free up additional CPU (Central Processing Unit) resources so that the game may run faster. Essentially, this is an easy way to allocate all of a computer's power/resources to the game being played so that the computer user does not end up spending additional money upgrading the computer. Have you ever had several applications open at once and then by closing some of them the computer's performance increased? Closing applications before running such a resource intensive application, such as an online game, is the same principle.
We strongly suggest that computer users who wish to play online games leave their anti-virus or anti-spyware protection running at all times even when attempting to play an online game. The malware-laced sites uncovered by Avast are only small percentage of other potentially infected gaming sites on the Internet.
Do you play games on your computer? If so, do you disable your security software before playing a game or online game? Answer this question in our poll below.