I stopped playing WOW 5 years ago... and this year i kept getting e-mails saying i reseted my password and so on. It did not happen untill this year, even tho my account was inactive for 5 years(i quit before the first expansion)...
I did not know they are making their users pay for their mistake and find it funny:)
wow blizzards charging for something like protecting your account?that makes me want to play wow even less than now. I never played WoW because it looked lame in all respects but this is just a new reason to stay away from it.
God wake up for once "guest writter" . No one hacking ur account and since you might ask how the hell do i know about this, well it happened to me too!
And here how it's done
Like you i 've been hooked on that damn game for years and ultimately sparked a aggravating aggro from the internal hacker, yes she sleeps right besides me for the last 5 years, and oblivious to her computer knowledge, serves me right.
After having contacted Blizzard, scouting forums for possible suspects, scanned the comp-rescanned, and finally i gone through the suspect check list, i couldn't find the smoking-gun. At this point the realisation sunk in, god i want to kill the mofo who hacked my account, but wait a minute, coult it be?? could it be??
After that day i keep staring her face with an experssion.." bitch i hope you got nothing to do with my wow account" and keep denying myself nah she can't possibly done it. It much too complicated for her, and no she didn't know my PWs and email address for that account, nah IT JUST COULD'NT BE HER.
After 2 months scratching my head trying figure out what had gone wrong and subconsciously cursing that mofa hacker, i decided to do a little "CTRL+H" on our two computers. And guess what i found, right bitch i know where you been to!!!
I ran straight to the fridge to check on the Credit card bill, there's a co$t of $40 bucks billed by paypal 2 days before my account got hacked.
.......well i know what will happen to the rest of the story
My Account was hacked TWO YEARS after I quit the game. Not only did my current PC not EVER have WoW on it, but the previous PC never had it on, either.
HOW did it get hacked?
I only discovered when I went to resub for Cataclysm.
I believe 90% of accounts hacked are hacked out of bad luck, the other 10% are dumb people that literally gave out info or bought gold or something similar so 100% deserve it. Really if it was blizz selling info (I'm sure at least 1 employee did it once, but it isn't as rampant as many believe), or about unprotected computers or mistakes, then I should've been hacked a million times already.
However I do think having a Authenticator (just $6.50 or free with certain phones) or dial-in authenticator (100% free) does reduce your chance right now, as hacking those accounts would take more effort.
For all those people saying, "Well I haven't played WoW in several years, so it has to be blizz selling accounts!"...no many hackers hold on to information until they need to switch, meaning they could have that information for years before they decide to actually hack that account...its like this: Imagine getting info for 5 accounts everyday, however you only mess with one on average a day. It's also smarter to hack into an account that hasn't been used in a long time, less likely someone is going to recognize it as a hack.
I understand the author is frustrated but I believe it is irresponsible for MMPROG.Com to publish this accusation without proof. The simpliest explanation is usually the correct explanation, and in this case the simpliest explanation is that the author did something to compromise his computer or his WOW password.
If you are just waking up to the fact that unscrupulous people are hacking the most popular MMO in video gaming history ever to make money, congratulations.. and Happy Birthday!
Usually, I don't like to side with big companies or corporations of ANY type, I'm somewhat of a socialist. But in this case, the author obviously is more to blame here than Blizzard.
Why?
First off, he's a MMO WRITER for God's sake! If anyone does know or SHOULD know that Blizzard has been getting hacked for years, it's him. And yes, he KNEW that going in. He's obviously been playing for years as well from what he described so he heard all the jokes about people getting hacked in the past, and probably even laughed at one or two of them.
If anyone SHOULD know how impossible it is to keep hackers out of MMOs, it's the OP. Blizzard did the best thing they could by making authenticators available. And they are dirt cheap and you don't pay monthly... pay for the flipping thing and forget it. If Blizzard was getting hacked and DID'NT offer these, or if he bought one and STILL got hacked, then that's Blizzard's fault.
This is just pure laziness and daring hackers to hit you.
If the author was some fresh guy off the boat and bought this game and didn't know anything about MMOs, Blizzard, WoW or hacks.. I'd side with him in a second.
But to have an account that had never been hacked and to say "Well, it SHOULD not get hacked" is a pretty infantile view from someone who looks as though they make their living in the genre.
C'mon... you figured your account after building it up after all these years wasn't worth the measly one-time $6.50 for an authenticator?
After all the money he invested in his toon over the years, to not spend that money is like buying a 60'' plasma and not buying the insurance to go with it. Just not too smart.
But at least you got an article out of it, so that's actually a positive!
My account got hacked too just 4 months ago and they sent me a letter about it. The weird thing is I have not been a subscriber since 2005. Even if I wanted to play I did not know my own password and would have had to use password recovery. I never use the same password for anything. It has to be something internally within there own company.
P.S. I did contact them about it and got my account returned to me. Once that happened I changed my password again and just forgot about it. I never plan on playing the game anyways.
lol mine got nailed too and i for one think it is a blizzard scheme too leech a few extra bucks outa people i mean right after they created this authenticator everyone gettin hacked.
Get the authenticator. Done. Easy and simple and you won't get hacked.
I would say most people who get hacked did do something stuipd no matter how smart they think they are. Most people do fall for those phising emails and there are tons of them. I get many every day. Other have viruses. Many ways to get a keylogger.
Sometimes you get hacked years after quitting wow. How? They had your information long ago. Or as with what happened to the recent gawker media hack, they got your username and passwords from hacking a site. You use that same username and password for WoW and they gave it a shot. They did get my username and password from gawker media and then used that to steal my facebook and twitter accounts as I used the same logins for that. Not a big deal, I got my accounts back.
I stopped playing WOW 5 years ago... and this year i kept getting e-mails saying i reseted my password and so on. It did not happen untill this year, even tho my account was inactive for 5 years(i quit before the first expansion)...
I did not know they are making their users pay for their mistake and find it funny:)
It's phising emails. You get them whether you play wow or not simply because they send these emails out to everyone. It doesn't mean anything.
Yes, the chinese can get into blizzard's system. They are "Beeeerrrry" Sneaky!
Good news is, you can get an authenticator on an Android device so you really dont have to cough up monies. Just search for "Battle.net authenticator", its free.
Saw an Authenticator for £9.99 in GAME today, I immediately thought Blizzard were cashing in on their playerbase being hacked all the time...Nice one Blizz...
What I despise about the process if how the Blizzard system, from the automated online one to calling customer support, assume you are guily of something malicious.
My account was hacked about 7 months after I had stopped playing. I had never purchased gold, gave out my account information, clicked on a phishing email, etc.
One random day, I get an email saying my account had been suspended. I called Blizzard up, saying hey, I don[object Window]t even play this. They start at such a position of assumed guilt, that they don[object Window]t even take the banhammer off the account, since obviously I deserved some sort of punishment for whatever evil thing I did to get hacked.
I think having an account in a popular game get hacked is a fact of like. I played Aion for a single month, right at release, and just got an email from NCSoft saying that account has been banned for botting.
Doesn't surprise me to the least, it's been happening alot in the past few years, I haven't played WoW since 2006 and earlier last fall I found out it was hacked and used to transfer gold and spam and Blizzard even tried a chargeback on me demanding the $14 for the subscription and they even managed to link the account to their battle.net account.
I sorted it all out and changed the password so impossible that even I can't remember it and even asked Blizzard to permanently suspend the account (I think they only did temporarily) and I don't care because I don't play it.
My account on LotRO got hacked recently; didn't visit any e-mail links, use third party services/add-ons etc. I ran four different (up to date) anti-virus programs and had nothing turn up. What I did do wrong was have a fairly weak password. I had been meaning to change it, but kept putting it off. So my characters were cleaned out of everything they had, and unfortunately Turbine is not as good as Blizzard on account recovery; I didn't get one item back.
Instead, they looked at the files of what I had and then paid each character an amount of gold that was supposed to be 'equivalent' to the value of the items and resources lost. That makes me wonder: If they knew what I had so that they could reimburse me with gold, why couldn't they just replace everything?
The moral of this story is, in addition to doing the things suggested (don't share accounts/account information, etc.), make sure you use a strong password. It doesn't take a modern computer running a password generator program very long these days to break a weak (or even medium) strength password.
As for WoW, I went back to that for the time being and grabbed one of those authenticators right off the bat. Even though I get e-mails 'from Blizzard' several times a day stating how my account has been hacked or banned for gold buying/selling, I have no worries regarding the security of that account. I wish more companies had authenticators available for those who wished to use them.
"Oh my, how horrible, someone is criticizing a MMO. Oh yeah, that is what a forum is about, looking at both sides. You rather have to be critical of anything in this genre as of late because the track record of these major studios has just been appalling." -Ozmodan
For those that keep saying it's only $6.50, don't forget about non-US players. When I tried to order one I found that they wanted to charge over $20 for postage. There is no way postage can cost this much, we use similar “authenticators” for some systems at work and they are sent from the USA with a total postage charge of $1.50 (3 business days).
And before anyone mentions it, no I can’t use the free ones, as I don’t have a mobile phone (and I’m not buying one just to get the authenticator).
I thought about buying a authenticator when I resubscribed after over a year away. I found I had to create a battle.net account, which I did. Not a big deal I thought at the time, however before then I hadn’t receive any phishing emails about WoW, but the very next day after creating my battle.net account I started to receive them (about 2 or 3 a day for a while).
The decision to use battle.net and email addresses to log-in was a very stupid one.
People try to plug all kinds of addons and things into WoW. It wouldn't surprise me if it came out someday that half these things generate the problems people have with their keys being stolen.
All I can say is, the amount of WoW accounts being hacked since Blizzard switched to battle.net is purely coincidental, right? I seriously doubt it. What is the point of making all your customers combining their accounts under one screen name except to make it easier to take over multiple accounts.
Even though I am not playing WoW anymore, I refuse to believe everyone being hacked is at fault. Besides, what do we know about Blizzard employees integrity being 100% loyal? What makes Blizzard a company thats so different from any other company in the world too greedy to not take on more scrupulous means of monetary gain? Throw the authenticator on top of this and it just screams red flags on so many levels you'd have to be stupid to not suspect anything.
Aside from that, I find it funny that of all the active and inactive MMO's on my computer and WoW was the only one hacked and not just once, but twice with 2 different emails and passwords.
Your theory requires a lot of things to happen that just are not plausible.
First, the amount of hacked accounts was really large prior to the battle.net merger. That is precisely why blizzard made authenticators available to customers 18 months before battle.net was even a reality. The problem was so large many years ago that blizzard made authenticators, think about that.
Something to keep in mind. How many millions of players changed their login name to something they have been posting all over the internet for years? How many have registered with it on websites all over the place. That is like posting half of your login information for anyone to find. Then how many people do you think use the same password on websites? Did you know the all the major wow newsites are own by one of the largest gold selling site in the world?
Then for it to be an inside employee, it would have to be something that has been going on for years and years, because of the wide variety of account ages that get hacked. Seeing how long this has been going on and how even new accounts are getting hacked that would mean blizzard is just to inept to catch some employee continuously accessing account login information? Hardly likely.
It is very likely that blizzard is LOSING money selling authenticators. The cost to physically create them and include postage for $6.50? Then to make many different ones that are free? Is this really something they would put their customers through to make a nickle? How much do you think they would lose if this was true and customers found out? Lawsuits and possibly criminal charges?
Ask yourself why wow was hacked and no other mmos. How many companies sell currency for EQ2, Warhammer, Conan, etc. There just isn't a market for other games anywhere close to that of wow.
In the end there are just to many people who have poor security habits and do not fully understand the many various directions that threats can come from. All this work to try to theorize that there is some sinister plot going on and evil deeds must be the source, when the big giant blinking obvious fact is that players are easy to prey on. They are easy to deceive and often left without any clue to what happened to them.
I haven't played WOW in a few years and my account has been hacked. My friends talked me into trying WOW again and when I tried found out it was hac ked I just gave up and deceided not to worry to much on it since some new games on horizon I am going try anyways. Only game account i had that has ever been hacked for any game in 13 years of MMOs.
Comments
...I have been playing mmos for 10 years and have only had my account stolen in WoW. Also my password has capital letters, numbers, and symbols in it.
I`m 99% sure Blizzard lost our info to hackers...
I stopped playing WOW 5 years ago... and this year i kept getting e-mails saying i reseted my password and so on. It did not happen untill this year, even tho my account was inactive for 5 years(i quit before the first expansion)...
I did not know they are making their users pay for their mistake and find it funny:)
wow blizzards charging for something like protecting your account?that makes me want to play wow even less than now. I never played WoW because it looked lame in all respects but this is just a new reason to stay away from it.
I understand how it feels in the kind of situation where your account may be hacked. I am sorry for those people.
However I did find it extremely funny that after the long rant he mentioned he didnt have an authenticator.
Jeremiah 8:21 I weep for the hurt of my people; I stand amazed, silent, dumb with grief.
Join me on Twitch Facebook Twitter
God wake up for once "guest writter" . No one hacking ur account and since you might ask how the hell do i know about this, well it happened to me too!
And here how it's done
Like you i 've been hooked on that damn game for years and ultimately sparked a aggravating aggro from the internal hacker, yes she sleeps right besides me for the last 5 years, and oblivious to her computer knowledge, serves me right.
After having contacted Blizzard, scouting forums for possible suspects, scanned the comp-rescanned, and finally i gone through the suspect check list, i couldn't find the smoking-gun. At this point the realisation sunk in, god i want to kill the mofo who hacked my account, but wait a minute, coult it be?? could it be??
After that day i keep staring her face with an experssion.." bitch i hope you got nothing to do with my wow account" and keep denying myself nah she can't possibly done it. It much too complicated for her, and no she didn't know my PWs and email address for that account, nah IT JUST COULD'NT BE HER.
After 2 months scratching my head trying figure out what had gone wrong and subconsciously cursing that mofa hacker, i decided to do a little "CTRL+H" on our two computers. And guess what i found, right bitch i know where you been to!!!
I ran straight to the fridge to check on the Credit card bill, there's a co$t of $40 bucks billed by paypal 2 days before my account got hacked.
.......well i know what will happen to the rest of the story
There is a very well setup keylogging site out right now. If you google 'wow armory' it's the first one to show up.
It's actually wow avmory so it kindda bleeds in. When you go to try to search something it asks for your login with the authentic setup.
My Account was hacked TWO YEARS after I quit the game. Not only did my current PC not EVER have WoW on it, but the previous PC never had it on, either.
HOW did it get hacked?
I only discovered when I went to resub for Cataclysm.
I believe 90% of accounts hacked are hacked out of bad luck, the other 10% are dumb people that literally gave out info or bought gold or something similar so 100% deserve it. Really if it was blizz selling info (I'm sure at least 1 employee did it once, but it isn't as rampant as many believe), or about unprotected computers or mistakes, then I should've been hacked a million times already.
However I do think having a Authenticator (just $6.50 or free with certain phones) or dial-in authenticator (100% free) does reduce your chance right now, as hacking those accounts would take more effort.
For all those people saying, "Well I haven't played WoW in several years, so it has to be blizz selling accounts!"...no many hackers hold on to information until they need to switch, meaning they could have that information for years before they decide to actually hack that account...its like this: Imagine getting info for 5 accounts everyday, however you only mess with one on average a day. It's also smarter to hack into an account that hasn't been used in a long time, less likely someone is going to recognize it as a hack.
-I want a Platformer MMO
I understand the author is frustrated but I believe it is irresponsible for MMPROG.Com to publish this accusation without proof. The simpliest explanation is usually the correct explanation, and in this case the simpliest explanation is that the author did something to compromise his computer or his WOW password.
OP, It's 2010.
If you are just waking up to the fact that unscrupulous people are hacking the most popular MMO in video gaming history ever to make money, congratulations.. and Happy Birthday!
Usually, I don't like to side with big companies or corporations of ANY type, I'm somewhat of a socialist. But in this case, the author obviously is more to blame here than Blizzard.
Why?
First off, he's a MMO WRITER for God's sake! If anyone does know or SHOULD know that Blizzard has been getting hacked for years, it's him. And yes, he KNEW that going in. He's obviously been playing for years as well from what he described so he heard all the jokes about people getting hacked in the past, and probably even laughed at one or two of them.
If anyone SHOULD know how impossible it is to keep hackers out of MMOs, it's the OP. Blizzard did the best thing they could by making authenticators available. And they are dirt cheap and you don't pay monthly... pay for the flipping thing and forget it. If Blizzard was getting hacked and DID'NT offer these, or if he bought one and STILL got hacked, then that's Blizzard's fault.
This is just pure laziness and daring hackers to hit you.
If the author was some fresh guy off the boat and bought this game and didn't know anything about MMOs, Blizzard, WoW or hacks.. I'd side with him in a second.
But to have an account that had never been hacked and to say "Well, it SHOULD not get hacked" is a pretty infantile view from someone who looks as though they make their living in the genre.
C'mon... you figured your account after building it up after all these years wasn't worth the measly one-time $6.50 for an authenticator?
After all the money he invested in his toon over the years, to not spend that money is like buying a 60'' plasma and not buying the insurance to go with it. Just not too smart.
But at least you got an article out of it, so that's actually a positive!
"TO MICHAEL!"
My account got hacked too just 4 months ago and they sent me a letter about it. The weird thing is I have not been a subscriber since 2005. Even if I wanted to play I did not know my own password and would have had to use password recovery. I never use the same password for anything. It has to be something internally within there own company.
P.S. I did contact them about it and got my account returned to me. Once that happened I changed my password again and just forgot about it. I never plan on playing the game anyways.
If you have a cell phone - just get the authenticator ap for "free".
lol mine got nailed too and i for one think it is a blizzard scheme too leech a few extra bucks outa people i mean right after they created this authenticator everyone gettin hacked.
Get the authenticator. Done. Easy and simple and you won't get hacked.
I would say most people who get hacked did do something stuipd no matter how smart they think they are. Most people do fall for those phising emails and there are tons of them. I get many every day. Other have viruses. Many ways to get a keylogger.
Sometimes you get hacked years after quitting wow. How? They had your information long ago. Or as with what happened to the recent gawker media hack, they got your username and passwords from hacking a site. You use that same username and password for WoW and they gave it a shot. They did get my username and password from gawker media and then used that to steal my facebook and twitter accounts as I used the same logins for that. Not a big deal, I got my accounts back.
But that's how they do it.
Tribes 2 is back!!!! http://www.tribesnext.com/
And from the makers of tribes: Fallen Empire: Legions http://www.instantaction.com/
It's phising emails. You get them whether you play wow or not simply because they send these emails out to everyone. It doesn't mean anything.
Tribes 2 is back!!!! http://www.tribesnext.com/
And from the makers of tribes: Fallen Empire: Legions http://www.instantaction.com/
Yes, the chinese can get into blizzard's system. They are "Beeeerrrry" Sneaky!
Good news is, you can get an authenticator on an Android device so you really dont have to cough up monies. Just search for "Battle.net authenticator", its free.
Saw an Authenticator for £9.99 in GAME today, I immediately thought Blizzard were cashing in on their playerbase being hacked all the time...Nice one Blizz...
What I despise about the process if how the Blizzard system, from the automated online one to calling customer support, assume you are guily of something malicious.
My account was hacked about 7 months after I had stopped playing. I had never purchased gold, gave out my account information, clicked on a phishing email, etc.
One random day, I get an email saying my account had been suspended. I called Blizzard up, saying hey, I don[object Window]t even play this. They start at such a position of assumed guilt, that they don[object Window]t even take the banhammer off the account, since obviously I deserved some sort of punishment for whatever evil thing I did to get hacked.
I think having an account in a popular game get hacked is a fact of like. I played Aion for a single month, right at release, and just got an email from NCSoft saying that account has been banned for botting.
Sheesh.
Doesn't surprise me to the least, it's been happening alot in the past few years, I haven't played WoW since 2006 and earlier last fall I found out it was hacked and used to transfer gold and spam and Blizzard even tried a chargeback on me demanding the $14 for the subscription and they even managed to link the account to their battle.net account.
I sorted it all out and changed the password so impossible that even I can't remember it and even asked Blizzard to permanently suspend the account (I think they only did temporarily) and I don't care because I don't play it.
My account on LotRO got hacked recently; didn't visit any e-mail links, use third party services/add-ons etc. I ran four different (up to date) anti-virus programs and had nothing turn up. What I did do wrong was have a fairly weak password. I had been meaning to change it, but kept putting it off. So my characters were cleaned out of everything they had, and unfortunately Turbine is not as good as Blizzard on account recovery; I didn't get one item back.
Instead, they looked at the files of what I had and then paid each character an amount of gold that was supposed to be 'equivalent' to the value of the items and resources lost. That makes me wonder: If they knew what I had so that they could reimburse me with gold, why couldn't they just replace everything?
The moral of this story is, in addition to doing the things suggested (don't share accounts/account information, etc.), make sure you use a strong password. It doesn't take a modern computer running a password generator program very long these days to break a weak (or even medium) strength password.
As for WoW, I went back to that for the time being and grabbed one of those authenticators right off the bat. Even though I get e-mails 'from Blizzard' several times a day stating how my account has been hacked or banned for gold buying/selling, I have no worries regarding the security of that account. I wish more companies had authenticators available for those who wished to use them.
"Oh my, how horrible, someone is criticizing a MMO. Oh yeah, that is what a forum is about, looking at both sides. You rather have to be critical of anything in this genre as of late because the track record of these major studios has just been appalling." -Ozmodan
For those that keep saying it's only $6.50, don't forget about non-US players. When I tried to order one I found that they wanted to charge over $20 for postage. There is no way postage can cost this much, we use similar “authenticators” for some systems at work and they are sent from the USA with a total postage charge of $1.50 (3 business days).
And before anyone mentions it, no I can’t use the free ones, as I don’t have a mobile phone (and I’m not buying one just to get the authenticator).
I thought about buying a authenticator when I resubscribed after over a year away. I found I had to create a battle.net account, which I did. Not a big deal I thought at the time, however before then I hadn’t receive any phishing emails about WoW, but the very next day after creating my battle.net account I started to receive them (about 2 or 3 a day for a while).
The decision to use battle.net and email addresses to log-in was a very stupid one.
People try to plug all kinds of addons and things into WoW. It wouldn't surprise me if it came out someday that half these things generate the problems people have with their keys being stolen.
wow...and I never thought to see a post or an article about an account getting hacked
oh the shock....
Your theory requires a lot of things to happen that just are not plausible.
First, the amount of hacked accounts was really large prior to the battle.net merger. That is precisely why blizzard made authenticators available to customers 18 months before battle.net was even a reality. The problem was so large many years ago that blizzard made authenticators, think about that.
Something to keep in mind. How many millions of players changed their login name to something they have been posting all over the internet for years? How many have registered with it on websites all over the place. That is like posting half of your login information for anyone to find. Then how many people do you think use the same password on websites? Did you know the all the major wow newsites are own by one of the largest gold selling site in the world?
Then for it to be an inside employee, it would have to be something that has been going on for years and years, because of the wide variety of account ages that get hacked. Seeing how long this has been going on and how even new accounts are getting hacked that would mean blizzard is just to inept to catch some employee continuously accessing account login information? Hardly likely.
It is very likely that blizzard is LOSING money selling authenticators. The cost to physically create them and include postage for $6.50? Then to make many different ones that are free? Is this really something they would put their customers through to make a nickle? How much do you think they would lose if this was true and customers found out? Lawsuits and possibly criminal charges?
Ask yourself why wow was hacked and no other mmos. How many companies sell currency for EQ2, Warhammer, Conan, etc. There just isn't a market for other games anywhere close to that of wow.
In the end there are just to many people who have poor security habits and do not fully understand the many various directions that threats can come from. All this work to try to theorize that there is some sinister plot going on and evil deeds must be the source, when the big giant blinking obvious fact is that players are easy to prey on. They are easy to deceive and often left without any clue to what happened to them.
I haven't played WOW in a few years and my account has been hacked. My friends talked me into trying WOW again and when I tried found out it was hac ked I just gave up and deceided not to worry to much on it since some new games on horizon I am going try anyways. Only game account i had that has ever been hacked for any game in 13 years of MMOs.