Account hacked? Why not stop and smell the flowers?
by Michael Zenke 
Jun 12th 2008 at 2:30PM
Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, Culture, Humor
It happens to the best of us. We try to be careful, we try to be conscientious, and then the unthinkable happens: your MMO account gets hacked. You log in to find your virtual life has been torn asunder. What happens then? Sean Sands, over at the Gamers with Jobs site, walks us through the ordeal of having his World of Warcraft account hacked.Sean reminds us that the most important thing to do is to keep things in perspective. Most likely the person that hacked you was just doing their job. It probably wasn't malicious, and unfocused rage never helped anyone resolve their problems. Moreover, Blizzard is well aware of the problems inherent to the account breach issue. They've got a polished, professional team ready to give you back your stuff in a timely fashion. In fact, as Sean notes, it may be that they're a bit ... too practiced at this.
The problem of account hacking is universal. We suggest you check out some of the security resources WoW Insider has on hand for World of Warcraft fans, as many of them can be transposed to another game. in the meantime, have you had any experiences with hacked accounts? What happened and ... most importantly ... did you get your stuff back?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Nadril said on 2:50PM 6-12-2008
One of the things to remember is that if you take care of your account, and what you download, you should never lose your account.
I want to say the #1 reason for WoW players losing their account is from downloading a new UI mod. Please remember that, even if it is a major site, they simply can't screen all of the content on there fast enough. Because of this be really careful of the UIs you are downloading and you should be a lot safer.
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Juice said on 7:54PM 6-12-2008
Im a very careful person but even the best of us get caught. I had recieved a personal e-mail with nothing more than a picture. Turns out to be a keylogging agent and I lost not just one but several accounts along with my e-mail to get the accounts back. You can never be too careful and just when you think its safe something bad happens. Murphy's Law ftw!
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ScytheNoire said on 11:21PM 6-12-2008
The main problem lies on the end of the company, in WoW's case, Blizzard. There are a dozen methods off the top of my head that could be used to prevent account hacking, yet, they haven't implemented anything yet. It would be easy to do, some very basic things, but Blizzard doesn't care, because it hasn't hurt their income much. People who get hacked aren't quitting.
So I blame Blizzard for lack of action on their part to prevent it.
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Derek K. said on 10:31AM 6-13-2008
But how invasive are those things? I'm not going to accept a second level of authentication. I play my account on 4 different computers in my house, with dynamic IPs from my ISP, so none of those will work.
I'm betting they looked at it and said "We can either make authentication more difficult, and annoy 85% of our clients. Or we can develop a good process for helping people that have been hosed, and get the 5% that are hacked about 50% happy."
Then math said "85% or 2.5%?" And math won.
ScytheNoire said on 8:17AM 6-14-2008
You think so limited Derek K. There needs to be nothing invasive about added security. What about say a dozen randomized buttons on the screen. They all have pictures on them. When you updated your account security, you picked two unique pictures, say, a flower and sword. When you go to log in, there's a dozen images, and you simply have to pick the two buttons that correspond to the two that you picked when creating your security info. No typing, no confusion, you just pick your two pictures. If they had this, a keylogger would be meaningless. They could of course try to figure out what it is by trying all the various combinations. But this is just a simple method that would increase security without harming customers in any way.
Need to think, not just shoot down ideas that work and are used already by many companies. My bank for example on their login, beyond the login, has me also pick a picture and phrase if I don't log in from my default IP address. Really simple, and it works. Pick the wrong one, that IP address is banned from logging in for an amount of time, might be 30 minutes, never got it wrong so far.
There was ways to fix the log in process, the first key one is to have forum login's seperate from account login's. That's the first thing to do . But beyond that, so many easy ways they could fix things, from an onscreen keyboard, to image selection, that would prevent the majority of these account hacks. They are just too lazy to do so.
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aurorallew said on 10:45AM 6-18-2008
Blizzard could easily allow players to opt-in to a higher-security login system, such as one that requires a USB hardware key. Players wouldn't be required to use it, but those who want to would have the added security.
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Derek K. said on 11:09AM 6-20-2008
As an option, I'd be fine with it - allow those that cared to do something more secure. Those that don't, stick with the basics.
Forum account is a big thing, I'll agree - it's pretty stupid to use the same user/pass.
But as far as the multiple icons or the like? Eh. I'm lazy. I get annoyed every time my bank makes me put in my pin via the on screen keyboard. I don't get too upset, because it's my bank. But my WoW account? I play enough MMOs, and log in and out of my account often enough, that I think that would annoy me enough to pick another MMO.
I know, it's pretty sad. But it's also true, and I suspect I have more patience than most of America.