For years, consumer advocacy groups have been warning about the effects of video games on our culture, suggesting that the violence of the games and the depth to which the players are drawn into the imaginary scenario often makes it difficult to separate the imagined from the real once the joysticks are unplugged. These claims may or may not be true, but the intrusion of video games into the very souls of our modern civilization has been recently verified by Dr. Web, a team of cybersecurity researchers.

As reported in The Hacker News, attacks have been levied against Counter Strike gamers by using the servers that allow them to compete. The attacks allowed the hackers to compromise computers by using zero-day vulnerabilities in the game client.

They call it Belonard, after the Russian gaming server developer who launched it in the wild. One of the key vulnerabilities of this particular game is age. It’s been around for a while, and hackers have been able to exploit multiple RCEs, or remote code execution vulnerabilities. Dr. Web has found that the malicious control extends to more that 39% of the servers in the Counter Strike network.

What’s That Got To Do With Me?

Even if you aren’t a gamer, and even if your exposure to Belonard is limited to nonexistent, consider the notion that hackers exploited a decades-old video game to launch a Trojan and manipulate or control the computers of gamers. Know any of those folks?

If you want to keep the bad guys from gaming your systems, call ICS today. After all, you can’t spell security without ICS.