News of hacks on different sites online is not entirely new. However, the new wave of hacking in recent times has caught the attention of most keen gamers. A shocking hack oversaw the loss of about $6 million in CS:GO skin value.
The site at the center of the $6 million attack was CS money, which is famous among those who have changed the skins of their CS:GO guns in recent times. However, for the majority of other gamers, CS money has reached them via sponsored ads while navigating the web or seeking info about new CS:GO releases.
Players seeking new skin in recent days have had their CS:GO plans affected by the hack. The site, which handles millions of transactions worth of CS:GO skins requests every few days, has put up a bounty hoping to know the identity of the thieves and have them pay back what they owe.
How Did the Hack Happen
Traditionally, hacks or site attacks have often focused on a compromised factor anywhere on the back end of the site or the bridge that connects the site to the user. While gamers know their way around the CS gaming ecosystem, they know little about staying safe online. What happened to CS money is no different.
According to Sobelevsky, the communication officer of the hacked site, the site’s autonomous bots, which controlled the movement of currency from the customer to the webpage, were temporarily hacked.
The bots stopped working for the company as the hackers took full control of them. The bad actors directed the bots to invite more parties to trade skins. The invited accounts helped clear out about 20,000 skins, which are worth about $6 million.
What Will Happen To The Affected Parties?
The $6 million worth of skins was a haul already on its way to the customers, meaning the company had to come up with a quick solution to deal with the situation.
CS money communication team assured compensation to everyone affected by the hack. In a statement, the company promised a fast reprieve as soon as the site returned to normalcy.
How Can Players Protect Themselves From Hackers?
Many hackers manage to penetrate sites via a weakness. The weakness might be because of negligence from the site owners, or the hackers are just too good at their IT skills. Automated sets of attacks in sites are the hardest to deal with, where the bad parties set up simultaneous automated attacks that check for weakness in numerous points.
CS money had at least 100 accounts compromised with about 1000 trades that took place so quickly by the use of trading bots that connect the buyers to the seller. The actors set CS money’s systems to work for their gain.
Some complicated methods of attacks used in some hacking sprees mean that ordinary traders visiting the site can do so little to shield themselves from future attacks on the site.
CS money has admitted to having some difficulties or a hard time in solving the issue. The company has claimed that there might be a second wave of attacks–a statement that has put most site visitors in an uncomfortable position.
However, one way of staying safe is by keeping the username and passwords of online skin purchasing accounts personal. Steam users, another company in the line of CS money, lost skins worth $2 million by a simple request made by rogue parties who had managed to know some personal account information of other account holders.
The rogue actors simply claimed to have forgotten their passwords in the accounts of other users, and once they set up new passwords, they would clear the account of any skins.
Concluding Remarks
While hacks come in different methods, some of which are sophisticated even for the site owners. Players can protect themselves by preventing their personal information from reaching rogue parties online.
