compromised-account
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Guy steals friend's goods in APB, GM offers vigilante justice in return
Account theft and compromise are tragic facts of life in all MMOs, as player BlackJackieChan discovered the other day when he logged into APB: Reloaded and realized that he was wiped out. After posting a tirade on the forums, BlackJackieChan got the attention of a GM, who subsequently investigated the crime. His findings were stunning: BlackJackieChan's in-game friend beef43302 was the culprit. Beef43302 had crept into his friend's account, swiped a number of goods, and then deleted the temporary characters used for the theft. Beef43302 then tried to cover up his wrongdoing by consoling BlackJackieChan with a new car and encouraging him to stick with the game. Even though BlackJackieChan was accused of not protecting his account (apparently he had shown his password to his friend), GamersFirst restored the stolen items and then offered BlackJackieChan the chance to decide his friend's punishment. "Seeing as this is a relatively unique case," the GM wrote, "we shall let you decide the fate of beef43302." BlackJackieChan has yet to respond on the thread, but the GM did tell the offender that the company suspended his account "unless BlackJackieChan says otherwise."
The Road to Mordor: Hacked!
"My kinship had just finished an instance run about a week-and-a-half ago and was in the process of reloading back into the world when I got the message that I was being disconnected because I had just logged into the Brandywine server. Huh? Suspecting the worst, I immediately hit up the Turbine Account page and changed my password then re-logged back into the game, which would boot the hacker offline just like I had been booted minutes earlier. "I was lucky and did that before the hacker had time to switch servers to where my active characters are. Other kinmates have not been so lucky." So goes the frightening tale of Pumping Irony's Scott, who shares this in the hopes that others may avoid a similar scare. Unfortunately, it seems as though stories such as these are becoming more and more common in Lord of the Rings Online, where the worst threat to your quest may not be the eye of Sauron but the malicious intent of hackers gutting your account while you're offline. Today we're going to step off the path for a temporary side trail into the gloomy undergrowth of account security and an MMO under siege.
Your Christmas gift could be hacking your WoW account
Hackers seem to be trying more and more ways to get legitimate accounts out of players hands and working to steal and farm more gold, but if you think they've had some sneaky schemes in the past, you ain't seen nothing yet. Our colleagues at Massively have a story that's both amazing and disturbing at the same time. A lot of geeks found a digital photo frame under the tree this year. Seems like a good idea, I'm sure a lot of us have a pretty large collection of digital photographs stored on memory cards and flash drives that we just haven't quite gotten around to printing for display. Unfortunately, certain frames sold at Best Buy, Target, Costco and Sam's Club come with an extra undocumented feature, in that they have a nasty little bug that's being dubbed Mocmex. The bug can burrow its way into your computer, latch itself in, and sniff out account information. It doesn't seem to affect Linux or Macs, at least not in its current form, but right now there doesn't seem to be a single manufacturer or frame type that's infected, so the origin of the bug hasn't been nailed down. If you think you've got one of the infected picture frames, Massively recommends contacting the SANS institute and calling the store where the frame was purchased. You can check their story for the contact information. The upside of this, I suppose, is that if the farmers are starting to branch into using peripherals to steal our accounts, they may be getting pretty desperate. The downside is, when we have people who practice safe web browsing and keep a clean computer getting bitten, like our Amanda Dean for example, we could be in some trouble. With any luck, all the major virus programs will have a cure for Mocmex and programs like it soon. In the meantime, it looks like we'll have to be extra careful about what we install on our computers, and make sure our anti-virus programs and firewalls are up to date.
Breakfast Topic: Hacked
My first post on WoW Insider was about a friend of mine being hacked, this time it's about me. I woke yesterday and tried to copy a character over to the public test realm as I've been doing often lately. I got a password error. I tried to log into my account- same thing. My email had this happy little surprise for me: Hello Amanda, The character transfers listed below have been completed as of 2/14/2008. The character[s] listed will now appear in the new location and/or account selected and are immediately available for play! - <character> - Level 70 Tauren Shaman - now on realm: Blade's Edge.
