“At the top end, some criminals are making almost £20,000 per week trading in stolen Fortnite accounts”
The problem with two-factor authentication (2FA) isn’t that it’s fundamentally flawed, because it isn’t. The problem is that it’s not yet the de facto login security baseline for every site, service and application. Some of the biggest firms, such as Activision in the gaming sphere, are also the biggest offenders.
When talk about a possible data breach involving hundreds of thousands Call of Duty accounts surfaced a couple of months back, Activision was quick to pour cold water on the reports. In the official statement provided to me, Activision said that it recommended “players take precautions to protect their accounts at all times”. The “Keeping your Activision account secure” page the statement pointed to offered some excellent advice to gamers: use a strong password; don’t use passwords that are used elsewhere; don’t share account credentials. What was missing? Yep, that’s right: there was no mention of activating 2FA on accounts because they don’t have that option available. I’ve chosen a gaming company to illustrate my point on this occasion for a good reason: gamers are prime cyber attack targets.
According to research conducted by Akamaifo for its late 2020 Gaming: You Can’t Solo Security report (), gamers have never been so popular amongst
