Gamer Cheater Hacker Spy

The title of this blog is a homage to the film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and presents the fact that video games and cheating is also tied to hacking and spying. It is a common trope in cybersecurity that professionals first became interested in the field through an encounter while playing games. Speaking personally, I first became enthralled with hacking in 2008 by matching against some modders using hacked weapons while playing Halo 3 (my favourite game of all time). This blog aims to highlight why monitoring the video game industry is important for cyber threat intelligence analysts hunting down the latest threats. Video games and hacking are very intertwined. Many hackers start out by creating cheats for games, and have to play the games to begin with to learn how to hack them. There are also several notable incidents whereby hacking in video games escalated to become critical issues for the software development industry and enterprise security realms. This includes zero-day ex