It sometimes seems like the world of game development is isolated from the risks of cybersecurity that governments and big business face, when stories like the massive Solar Winds attack get the spotlight in the news. After all, other than the occasional email or notification that email or credit card data might have been leaked, this sort of news seems to not hit so close to home — and usually not the world of gaming.
But then, stories like this come to light: CD Projekt Red (Polish developer of Cyberpunk 2077 and the Witcher game series) recently fell victim to a ransomware attack that, reportedly, came at a very high cost when the company refused to pay the ransom for their data. Before that occurrence, late last year, Japanese game developer and publisher Capcom was caught up in a ransomware attack that exposed a range of data. And there are plenty of other stories of breaches, leaks, and other attacks, just from 2020 alone.
Serious stuff, right? So, it’s not a hard argument to make that strengthening their defenses against cybersecurity attacks is important to game developers and publishers and, ultimately, gamers themselves.
With that in mind, the Georgia Game Developers Association shared a video from their virtual SIEGE Con from 2020, from the perspective of the information security vendor, Ionic Security, which addresses a few key starting points around data an systems security that game developers might want to consider. This half-hour long video is led by Ken Lightner, who had a game development career that shifted to Ionic Security and work on their client SDK, and Christy Smith, also with Ionic Security, is involved with the company’s industry analyst relations.
To start with, perhaps the key definition to keep in mind is what “Zero Trust” is. The video description describes it is as “a security framework that has been gaining industry traction. It doesn’t mean nothing is trusted, but it does mean all trust must be earned, or in a more technical sense, authenticated and authorized.”
This video covers an introduction to Ionic Security, setting the stage for why this topic matters in dealing with cybersecurity issues, What Zero Trust is about, the four core imperatives that define Zero Trust, who’s using that framework — and also how to get started with with resources and tutorial links. The last six minutes of the video is dedicated to Q/A with the virtual audience and the two presenters.
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