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World of Warcraft: Integrity Compromised
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In The Rant this week, MMORPG.com's resident ranter, Adam Janovyak, reveals a daring and horrendous secret: His World of Warcraft account has been hacked. If that's not enough to send flurries of obscenities flying into the pre-holiday air, nothing is. Check out Adam's thoughts about being hacked by a dirty rotten no-good scoundrel and then let us know about your experiences in the comments below.
“You might want to check on your WoW account because I think it’s been hacked.”
My mouth became immediately dry and my palms started to sweat as a knot formed in my guts. I hung up the phone without another word, and sheepishly attempted to login to my account. Sure enough, my password doesn’t work. Beautiful.
Read more of The Rant: Integrity Compromised.
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Comments
Mine got hacked as well and i never gave my info out, bought gold or PL's. Dont know how they did it. This is the 2nd account i lost to hackers. I told Blizzard to go shove it and im never playing a blizzard game again. IMO, Blizzard sells inactive accounts to the highest chinese bidder to make you buy their authenicators.
Ok i believe the hackers are in Blizzard's system. I had three accounts, every account uses a different email address and as soon as that account is created I get an email from blizzard and immediately thereafter an email from a gold seller... cooincidence? I think not.
I have only been hacked once, that was on my third account that had no authenticator and had nothing of value so it has been written off.
Very amusing and honest writing ^^
for the rest ... lol ... anyhow, not gonna waste my breath further. Something did happen that they got your account but meh.. playing for 15 years mmorgps , never ever once I got compromised ( being an IT specialist helps I guess
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Anyhow hope you get all your stuff back , blizz improved rather a lot on that matter so relax get a drink ^^
Did they steal your credit card info? No? Then no one has access to blizzard servers. You got keylogged. Moving on.
Didn't one of the other staff writers here get their shit hacked too recently?
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And no. I have no keyloggers and have never had a keylogger. i could get into how I know this and what precautions I have in place to avoid them but, I feel you would have no clue what I was talking about.
You don't have to have a CC# in the system to have an account. There are game time cards you buy to keep your account going. Maybe you've seen them?
i reinstalled wow after not playing for months and found out my account was being used for gold farming. so i switch my PW and go to log on today and pw was changed. there was also an authenticator attached to my accout(by whoever hacked my account) so i switch my PW again and log in and immediately delete all my chars. ive had it with wow. i will never go back
Running your browser as a user that has administrator access to your machine can get your machine rooted just by visiting websites - you don't even have to click on anything. Having scripting enabled and allowing Flash items to automatically run without approval can install stuff in your user folders if you're not running with admin privileges. It wouldn't necessarily even be the website you visit but the advertising on the website you visit. It's not that hard to get hacked even with AV software.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
hey it happens, but to give blizzard credit their customer support is #1 bar none. It's the most popular mmo so there will be a lot of stuff out there to target it, just like hackers favor windows instead of mac for the same reason. Shit happens just be thankful they don't say its your fault and don't help you.
I've also have been hacked. Luckily for me they only sold everything on my main character so the loss wasn't that great. The support of Blizzard was really good though since I got all my items and gold back
That does suck Adam and you have my sympathy. It amazes me that Blizzard, being the monsterously HUGE successful company that they are, cant throw everyone a bone and just give them the flippin authenticators. It shouldnt matter who is at fault for being hacked. They should see that there is a problem and do what is right to fix it.
Alot of free to play games have authenticators, Maple Story was one which my son played years ago. To charge someone to fix a big problem that is effecting your business is unresponsible. How expensive to Blizzard could it possibly be to provide it into thier service?
Some people believe that only morons and suckers get hacked. To them I say there are crazy amounts of ways to get hacked and different methods that people use to do so. I will not go into a huge wall of text to go over all of the ones that I have either read or witnessed first hand, there are people that have already done that on this site and some good advise can be had from them.
As for your write up, I got alot of chuckles out of your descriptive visions but by no means do I laugh at your pain.
Work hard Play Harder
the most likely way that the guys account got hacked, is that the email address linked to his battlenet account is the one he uses for everyday use, thats fail number 1.. then there is the lack of an authenticator.. failure number 2.. and then there is the password itself, does he use the same password elsewhere, like as a forum/BB password, the number of accounts that have been hacked this way are phenomenal. in the end its your own lookout to protect your account, although i do think that Blizzard made a stupid mistake by tieing usernames to email accounts, that in itself was asking for trouble, the details though, are not being leaked from Blizzard/Battlenet, of that you can be sure, but, poor account security now almost guarantees a hacking attempt, if people have not figured this out by now and had an authenticator put on their account, then, they have nobody to blame but themselves.
i know the feeling of being hacked, thankfully i never been hacked even once in my MMO history, that is why i never play outside of my home PC, and i always use double protection of Antivirus and Malware. also, yeah, dont go to wierd websites
So What Now?
4 EQ1 accounts for 4+ years, never was hacked. EQ2 account for a few years, never was hacked. 2 Eve Online accounts for 6+ years, never was hacked. 1 WoW account for 4+ years. Never was hacked. Too many other online games: Never was hacked.
I also don't download mods, avoid crappy parts of the internet, and in general don't do stupid things like click on links I don't know.
So when I hear "I didn't do anything, and I still got hacked, it must have been Blizzard!", I tend to NOT believe it. (Also, as a programmer/developer, I'm forced into doing tech support from time to time, and the lies just pour forth from user's mouths. PEBKAC is the #1 reason bad things happen.
I stoped playing WOW back in late 08....I just came back to the game to try Cata. To my surprise my account had been hacked and used a a gold sellers account. I never once had a keylogger on my system or did anything to get on on my system. I am also an IT spec. So to say that I do not know about net security would be far from the truth. I was not able to get anything back from my account other than 250g from blizzard and new lvl 80 gear for one of my characters. I honestly belive that it is from within blizzard maybe an employee selling user information for inactive accounts. Because other then that I do not know how they would have obtained my information for an account that has not been used by me for over a year. Blizzard told me that they used a hacked CC to activate my account back in mid 2009 to use my account for selling gold.
Assuming that they just want you to spend more money in nonsense, seeing as they offer free authenticators through mobile apps. I understand it's frustrating, but if you don't go through the steps to recover it, I don't feel bad for you.
Actually a fairly common way is to gain access to e-mails and accounts on pages like this one... Now i am not saying that MMORRG.com have their database scourde but less secure sites and all those guildportal like pages are valid targets and if you use the same password for your mail or wow account on there then you have as good as left the door to you house open.
I have a authenticator after simply being tired one day and having a missclick on a bad link. Got a logger and bam my account was being molested... lucky me the person was a idiot and i caught him red handed using the account. After that i got one of those and so far it seems to work well.
But yeah i think that as much as 90% (number pulled out of thin air, but having worked tech suppor anc billing seems reasnoble) of all "hacks" are end user caused in one way or another. Best way to avoid it... Buy a authenticator.
This have been a good conversation
To the author of the rant... Umm.. if your account got hacked... 999 times out of 1000 it is your fault. You probably (unknowingly) downloaded a keylogger. If you're 100% certain you didn't get infected by ANY sort of malware... maybe your password was too weak and got cracked the good ol' fashioned way.
The fact of the matter is, WoW is the most popular MMO on the planet. Keyloggers are rampant, and the only WoW players who are 100% safe from keyloggers are those who play exclusively on Macs (hackers don't spend the time to code for Macs as it's more difficult than coding for Windows... plus Macs hold such a small section of the personal computer market). But... even Mac players are not immune to the perils of a weak password and a persistent cracker.
BTW... you can get a free authenticator app on the iPhone, Blackberry, or any Android phone. Heck... you could even get it on an iPod Touch or iPad. No need to give Bliz $6.50.
I must agree with your final lines though... no happy holiday wishes to gold farmers or account hackers. May the fleas of 10,000 mangy dogs infest their armpit hairs.
Never argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level, then beat you with experience.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe ... ... Just maybe.... you have been lucky ? Being an IT specialist does not mean you are absolutely safe from being compromised.
That does not mean you are a bad tech, it just means that there is always some brilliantly twisted shmuck out there to break systems checks that would otherwise be safe for people that are not malicious.
Work hard Play Harder
There are a lot of careless or simply ignorant users. But there is also something to be said about sys admins doing their best to 'idiot proof' their own system for users. Making a poor security design choice, and then blaming users for not going out of their way to adjust for it is just lazy IT security.
A perfect example of this is the Battle.net merge. Every account was forced to merge into Battle.net. Every Battle.net account uses it's linked email as the username. So basically user account authentication has gone from using two private pieces of information (username and password), into to using a 'public' piece of information (email) and one private piece of information (password). Now, it doesn't take an IT security genious to realize that when you make one half of your authentication available, you've basically given out half of what people need to breach into your account.
So while some people just blame users, the blame also lies with the admins of the system. It is the responsbility of those administrating the system to make it as secure and easy to secure for their users as possible, as it is for users to do their part in keeping their authentication details private. In short, Blizzard's sloppy IT security has contributed to the issue.
Luck has nothing to do with it. Not handing out my account/passwords to friends, not downloading addons, etc, does.
Heck, until very recently, I didn't bother with anti-virus for 20 years. I've had to remove malware/spyware/viruses/trojans from many computers.... but strangely, never my own.
No, it isn't luck.
You all realize...hes right.....
http://eu.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=221003617 (EU)
http://us.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=1100000822 (US)
http://us.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=1100000823 (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Latin Amerika)
and whoooppeeeee, we are hack secure.
btw, being hacked in wow only takes you about a week to get your stuff back (happened twice to me, yes my passwords sucked *G*), being hacked in most other games results in you buying a new account or changing games
just a thought.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
Ok .. you have not used an anti-virus for 20 years and have not gotten hacked or any malicious programs in all that time. How could being lucky possibly have anything to do with that. I guess I stand corrected.
Out of curiosity, why did you recently decide on getting an Anti-virus program if you have had such success without one?
Work hard Play Harder
No one said you had to use your everyday about as safe as french-kissing a cobra hotmail/gmail/yahoo/and so on. Just make a new account with a mail you don't use at all... Voila it is again as safe as your username.. heck prolly safer...
This have been a good conversation