Woe is me, for I have been hacketh

Well, it has finally happened to me too; My World of Warcraft-account has been compromised!

Woke up this morning to several messages on my cellphone from friends asking if I was currently playing on my WoW-account. Seems I had been seen botting in Storm Peaks for several hours without responding – not only weird because of the botting-part (which I would never had done), but also because the most I have played in the last month is to log in once or twice just to check up on some people.

I immediately went to eu.battle.net and changed my password, then started the usual process of scanning for viruses and/or malicious programs lurking in my process list – with no results – system appears to be clean as a whistle. I never share my account-details with anyone, haven’t logged in at anyone else’s computer, found no virus and/or trojans – so I’m pretty much clueless to how my account got hacked.

Anyway, I eventually logged in to my account, and found that my higher-level alts had been cleared out of all sell-able gear and items, both on character and in bank. My main character – a druid – retained most of the feral gear (to be used for botting, apparently!), while all the sell-able parts of the resto gear were gone with the wind, along with my cash. They’d also cleared out the gold from my alts as well as the gold from the guild-bank (a defunct guild with very little cash in the bank, but still – principle of the thing).

I’ve opened a GM ticket, and I’m now waiting (“Wait time currently unavailable”) to see how the rest of this story will unfold.

3 thoughts on “Woe is me, for I have been hacketh”

  1. Anywhere you can make legitimate money, crime will follow.

    There are people, bots… vast, cool and unsympathetic… that brute force passwords on mmos to do exactly what happened to you. The question these days isn’t if you’re going to get hacked, but when.

    The problem is so bad that blizzard is selling these little USB dongles to increase security. I think that’s silly and extreme. There are lots of ways to increase security without going that route. But blizzard is all about the Lincolns.

    I doubt blizzard will be able to help. They are one of those “I’m sorry I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am” companies.

    What puzzles me, Holmes, is what someone interested in virtual worlds is doing in a theme park to begin with.

  2. What, I can’t enjoy both virtual worlds and theme parks? :) I recognize WoW for what it is – a damn good theme park – and I do enjoy parts of it (questing, light-weight group content along with friends), and will be playing it again when the next expansion arrives, for the same reason.

    I’m getting mixed feedback from people who’ve gotten their own accounts hacked – some say Blizzard re-instated everything on their account, others that only the characters were fixed (if deleted, for instance) – and others still that their account was closed permanently by Blizzard.

    I guess it comes down to the circumstances surrounding the event. Still no reply to my GM ticket, though.

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