Metaverses represent a new step forward in game development and social platforms and the integration of them both with each other. It’s a bold further progression that could redefine game development as we understand it and pave the way for the future. As with any new technology, however, it is subject to security issues and vulnerabilities.
One of the highest priorities of any metaverse developer must be their platform’s and its users’ safety and security. As the cybersecurity and metaverse development experts across the Magic Media group would agree, security is a cause for concern with this emerging technology among many prospective users. Fortunately, measures can be taken to ensure a safe environment and alleviate security risks.
Risks of Social Engineering
Just like in the gaming industry and business, there is a chance that ill-intentioned people will attempt to gain metaverse users’ personal information. Phishing attempts are made to many ends, committing fraud, impersonation, or simply acquiring sensitive information to name a few. The difference between this occurring in a metaverse is that it can be more challenging to identify. Over email, phishing attempts are usually easily spotted or can be determined to be spam after taking some time to investigate. In the metaverse, people are commonly represented by avatars which can make it difficult to discern genuine intent to communicate from misleading attempts to interact.
To combat this effectively, metaverse users need to know how to spot social engineering attempts quickly and avoid interacting with them. To this end, metaverse developers should publish robust guidelines for spotting these malicious interactions. Understanding the telltale signs of phishing attempts and knowing to report them can keep metaverse users safe. Though this emphasizes individual users to learn how to combat them, it’s a beneficial skill for the metaverse, gaming, social platforms, and more.
The Challenges of Moderation
Much like any social platform or online gaming environment, moderation is critical to ensure the safety of metaverse users. Individual users can only do so much to avoid inappropriate and terms of service-breaking content, so a moderation team is crucial to ensure harmful content and communications are removed. The issue with moderation in metaverses is that they tend to be so large, it’s practically impossible to keep track of every interaction and intercept inappropriate content.
It’s an individual user’s responsibility to behave acceptably while part of a metaverse, but as seen in countless scenarios with online games such as MMOs, there are often people who won’t adhere to user policies. To combat this, stringent guidelines around user behavior should be published, in addition to reporting functionality. This can address issues of moderation teams being unable to catch every instance of inappropriate behavior by empowering users to take action. Moderation is useful, but it’s prudent to enable users to be proactive about inappropriate content.
Further to this, the metaverse developer should put in place appropriate punitive measures to discourage users from further inappropriate actions. This could include anything from suspensions, bands, disabling communication for the user, and more. With this in mind, it’s important that every user report is taken seriously and investigated and the appropriate measure taken against the offending user.
Security Vigilance and Technical Issues
Technical issues can lead to safety and security vulnerabilities in the metaverse, not just issues stemming from user behavior. Metaverse developers should ensure that the platform is as technically sound as possible with the fewest bugs possible. This requires rigorous testing and optimization, but it should also include the ability for users to report bugs too. As with moderation in metaverses, catching every single bug is likely impossible, so if users are likely to occasionally encounter technical issues they should be able to report them, so they can be resolved quickly.
Security vulnerabilities can crop up and they should be treated as a priority to resolve them as soon as possible. Without doing so, metaverse developers risk users’ personal information, financial information, addresses, and more getting leaked. Information leaks from social platforms are all too common in today’s tech-driven world, and they should be prevented at all costs. This is especially important for blockchain-driven metaverses, as users will have valuable digital assets on your platform.
It’s wise to patch security issues as soon as they occur, but to prevent further issues it’s a good idea to hire security experts to conduct audits. These audits can highlight further vulnerabilities that could otherwise go unnoticed for a detrimental amount of time.
User Authentication and Data Encryption
User authentication is of critical importance to ensuring safe and secure metaverses. At the very minimum, there should be password encryption available as with any other application, but ideally, there should be multiple avenues for authentication available. Strong password policies and multi-factor authentication are common among tech companies and most applications, but there are other options available. Single Sign-On (SSO) is widely used among organizations where accessing multiple apps is necessary, but the downside is that if a user’s credentials were compromised, the offending party would have widespread access to various systems.
Data encryption is another vital security consideration for metaverse security. Metaverses are capable of transmitting massive amounts of data, and as such, this data should be as safe as possible. In case of data breaches, encryption can save users’ information, and save the developer tons of work rectifying it. There are several types of encryption available, with some of the most common ones being in transit, meaning that data is secured while it’s transferring from one point to another, at rest, which protects it when it’s not being transferred, and end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption is the ideal choice, as it offers protection against data breaches at every level during the data’s entire lifecycle.
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