This year has certainly seen a wide uptick in the number of cybercrimes with each week bringing in a new case of a major attack happing. This week, it was revealed that the widely popular kid’s game app – Animal Jam – had millions of its account records stolen following a successful breach.
Worse still, the company behind the game app, WildWorks, stated that they remained unaware of the vast data breach until they were informed by security researchers monitoring the darknet where the records were being posted.
What this potentially means is that millions of users may have already been affected before the company decided to take the necessary steps to resolve the issue. Thankfully, at least in the words of the company, highly confidential information such as billing name and address were only included in less than 0.02% of the stolen records.
Still, with information such as email, username, and other such details, hackers could have made use of them to carry out phishing attacks against customers and attempt to steal sensitive such as credit card details information from them. The vulnerability is compounded given the fact the great majority of the users of the game app tend to be children aged 11 or younger.
Once the breach was known, the company quickly notified its customers of it and urged them to immediately change their passwords to prevent an account takeover. It was warned them to stay cautious of any emails asking them for their personal information.
Once considered a low-risk industry, in recent years, cybercrimes against companies engaged in online kid games and toys have been on a steady increase. Given the small size of many players in the sectors, the resources simply aren’t there to invest in robust in-house IT support and security team. Simply outsourcing to just any managed IT support company isn’t viable either, as noted in the above case, where the breach happened partly as a result of a third-party vendor through which Wildworks operated its servers. Rather, the help of dedicated and reputable IT security services is recommended, one which possesses the expertise and tools to quickly detect and prevent cyber-attacks on your valuable IT infrastructure.