Online video games have come a long way in the last two decades, and the last ten years significantly boosted the popularity of esports. However, with this popularity, various cybersecurity risks became prominent. We explore these risks and why cybercriminals are interested in the esports market. We also consider how a residential proxy service like this can help combat these cybersecurity challenges.
What’s Esports?
Esports refer to the category of competitive video games. Popular esport games are Counterstrike, League of Legends, Dota, Rocket League, Valorant, Overwatch, Fortnite, and more. These online games are played in massively competitive events, where the most skilled gamers face off against each other.
Popularity of Esports
This market has grown exponentially, reaching $950 million in revenue in 2020. In 2022, its global market size value was $1.39 billion. Now, studies estimate it’ll grow at a CAGR rate of 16.7% until 2030. Organizers held Esport matches in person at event halls with thousands of attendees. However, due to the pandemic and the shift in perspective, many esport tournaments have migrated online.
Further, gambling on esports has also become increasingly popular. Various US-regulated online sportsbooks allow bettors to place wagers on their favorite gamers. This interest in the esport market helped the industry become incredibly lucrative, but also painted a target on its back.
Cybersecurity Challenges
As esports become more popular, it becomes a more appealing target for cybercriminals. “Why,” you might ask? Below we look at the main cybersecurity challenges esports face and why they face these risks.
Hacked Accounts
The pro-gamers part of the esports market have immensely valuable accounts. Different games increasingly link with your Steam, Epic, GOG Galaxy, Playnite, GeForce, or other game launcher. That means hacking your account to the game launcher will give the hacker access to all the games you play.
Esport games can have valuable items in the game account. These items include unique skins, legendary items, and your character’s level and experience. As such, cybercriminals can sell these accounts for a pretty penny on the dark web. Once they hack and steal your accounts, it’s rare to get it back. They can also access your payment details. That’s because your payment details are generally saved here for online purchases.
Targeted Events
With how massive esports events have become, one compromised device can lead to hundreds of thousands of devices becoming vulnerable. Cybercriminals can hack your device to access the event details, which means the organizers can stop the competition, and gamers and viewers can become compromised.
It can also allow a malicious act where the hackers infect the event and its connected servers with malware, a virus, or plant a bug in your system. This unauthorized access can lead to DDoS attacks, system failures, or leaked data. Further, with events moving online, all critical and confidential information is available online.
How Proxies Enhance Your Cybersecurity
However, all is not lost. Esport gamers and viewers have one last shield item to use, which helps defend against cybersecurity risks. A residential proxy service can help enhance your gaming experience and protect you. Below, we consider how proxies help ensure esports are safer.
Protects Your Information
Proxies are intermediary servers that route your traffic through them and ensure you don’t make direct contact with online sites. As such, it hides your IP address from hackers and protects your accounts from unauthorized access. It also makes it challenging to track your digital footprint and effectively makes you a ghost to online hackers.
Reduces Security Risks
Proxies also help reduce security risks. They do it by blocking suspicious connections, restricting sites known to be malicious or have malware, and making you untrackable. The server’s security adequately protects itself from cyberattacks, so there’s no way hackers can trace it to you. Further, it helps prevent DDoS attacks and overall delivers safer connections.
Provides Better Performance
Besides the security benefits, it also improves your gaming performance. Your connection is more stable using a proxy, and you can experience faster connection speeds. Further, it helps reduce lag by caching data and storing it with the proxy server.
Accessing this stored information is more manageable, resulting in faster loading speeds and no lagging, which is essential in a competitive event. Playing a game, you must always connect with the game’s central server, which can slow your connections if you’re further away from it.
Bypass Restrictions
Another benefit is that you can bypass restrictions. With esport events moving online, you don’t necessarily need to travel to the country which hosts it. However, that means you might experience restrictions on accessing the central servers from your country.
Using a proxy, you can set your location to be the same as the event’s servers, ensuring your geolocation does not negatively impact you. This feature also helps you better connect to the central server we mentioned above.
Access Any Servers
The last benefit is that proxies give you access to any server worldwide. It makes joining specific servers for events easier and helps ensure you can play with your teammates. Esports, being so highly competitive, require a lot of training, practice, and grinding levels.
Using a proxy, you can efficiently train and grind with your teammates or experience how players on other servers play. It further helps prevent overloaded servers, which slows your connection.
Esports and Proxies: A Beneficial Relationship
It’s old news that esports have become as popular as other sports under the right crowd. However, unlike many physical sports, this online activity is vulnerable to cyber threats. That’s why using a residential proxy service, or a similar one, is essential to help prevent and protect against cybersecurity risks.
