Safety first applies to the real and digital world. Our lives are moving from the physical into bits and bites that can decide our future. Personal, banking, sensitive, and many other forms of information are floating on servers and cables, with little to no control from our side. The burden of protection lies with gaming companies who aim to win our trust and prevent unwanted scenarios. How? We’ll explore their options below.
1. Securing the payment gateway
Think of the internet as a large highway with many checkpoints. Your data is travelling from one place to another and needs to pass these checks. Some checkpoints, or gateways, have ill-intended guards, others are fake, and some send your data to a different path. Whatever the malicious reasoning behind an unprotected gateway may be, hackers will always target them as they are the choke points in the internet, and gaming companies can secure payment gateways by encrypting the data, whenever a player interacts with the gaming company.
We can take a look at this page, where expert casino writer Sergio Zammit shares some of the most secure online casinos that value their customers’ safety and encrypt all deposits, requests, and withdrawals. Financial and personal data are all within an online casino and player interaction, so each needs to maximise player safety to ensure continuous operation and good brand recognition. Secure payment gateways also guarantee fraud protection, as companies can then monitor transactions over their controlled gateways and spot any possible frauds, deviations, and unlikely transactions, staying one step ahead of the hackers.
2. SSL encryption
Encryption is a popular method for cybersecurity because it works. Encryptions are hard to crack without a key, and Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, remains one of the most widely used encryption methods. On the internet highway, SSL makes sure that the players and gaming companies directly communicate and that there are no third-party lane cutters. Because a player has a specific encryption made by SSL with the gaming server, it’s nearly impossible for hackers to disrupt or steal data. Identity theft is prevented, and players’ sensitive data remains secure, so it’s always good to look for companies that use SSL.
Encryption is the foundation of crypto, which has done much to promote the practice and remain one of the most secure means for online transactions, where crypto gambling sites claim to offer security and privacy for their users. Each part of the crypto blockchain is read-only, encrypted, and interconnected, allowing the user and the gaming company to enjoy layers of protection against any malicious penetration attempts.
3. Anti-DDOS measures
Distributed Denial of Service is a popular method to sew chaos and cause wide server outages and damage. By overwhelming the server capacity of any gaming company, attackers can use the disarray caused to further progress their agenda. However, gaming companies are not without a cure, and DDOS attacks are preventable and manageable. Rate limiting adjusts the number of requests a server can handle at the moment, which can throttle DDOS attacks.
Firewalls offer protection and the ability to block traffic from an unwanted source, as DDOS attacks usually come from several servers. Actively monitoring server traffic is perhaps the most direct and easiest form of anti-DDOS measure, as a gaming company can get an early start against a DDOS attack and sudden spike in traffic. Companies who invest in early detection and prevention of DDOS attacks can also use DNS flooding, as a countermeasure against attackers.
4. Employee training
Even with all the best hardware and software regulations in place, companies are still not immune to security breaches. It’s easy to forget that cybersecurity also has a human factor, and gaming companies must invest in their employee cybersecurity training, for when attackers aim to use the real world to get into the virtual one. Manipulating people, making them reveal confident data, share sensitive info, or provide restricted access all fall under standard phishing techniques.
Using phishing, attackers can exploit unaware gamers and gaming company employees, generating multiple entry points and compromising the data and safety of users. Apart from enrolling in expensive training programs, keeping your information to yourself and not oversharing and exposing yourself online remain the best safety practices available.