The popular mobile game Fortnite, currently in a legal battle between its developer Epic Games and Apple, is a gold mine for hackers as cybercriminals are selling stolen accounts and in-game `skins for roughly $1.2 million (about Rs 8.7 crore) per year. The hackers first collect a few thousand stolen Fortnite accounts together and auction in private Telegram channels selling from anywhere between $10,000 and $40,000 per log. Checking for valid Fortnite accounts can be as easy as loading a list of email/password combinations into the right software. The value of a hacked Fortnite account comes from the character`s in-game `skin`. An additional 30% revenue or $300 million per year can be generated by tallying the black-market sales for every other video game in existence, "conservatively making the entire hacked video game market a billion dollar a year industry".

Source: dna August 31, 2020 06:11 UTC