World of Warcraft

I will make this as detailed and short as possible.

I have a friend that plays WoW and he has a high lvl toons that has been hacked 4 times so far, every time they hack him blizzard tells him they will not release the account back over to him until they investigate it. Thet first time blizzard returned the account to him, many of his alts were deleted and lost, only his lvl 70 hunter was left and they took all his gold and tossed many of his BG armor (That's just evil).

The second time his account was hacked was a shock because he changed his passwords and everything but they still hacked it. They made him wait 2 weeks both times they hacked it and he had to fax a lot of documentation to blizzard just to get his account back, everytime he gets his account hacked he has to go through a lot of faxing stuff to get it back. It has happened four times, the latest it has happened was lastnight.

We were both lvling out deathnights and I logged out for bed before he did. He logged out at 12:00am. Another friend we play with (we are friends in RL) logged in and saw his hunter exploring the new area, my other friend whispered him and said "Hi bro" because thats how we address eachother, we never just say "hello" but this person responding with a "hello" and when my friend caught on that it was not him he started questioning him but he never got a response. He called him in the morning to ask him if that was him or not and he was just as shocked as anything; he said it wasn't him and when he tried to log in after my friend told him, he was told that his account is under investigation.

This guy is a good friend of mine and he wont even give me his info (not that I want it) and I asked if he ever shared his info with anyone he said no. I'm tired of this happening to him as I know he is as well but blizzard won't do anything about it. I think who ever is hacking his account is doing so easily because they have his "Content ID" when we played FFXI we never had this issue because of the security and privacy of the game. I'm telling him to ask blizzard to change his Content ID but he was told they won't do that. I think they should be obligated to do so since there is nothing that he can do to stop the hacking, and that is a breach of the privacy agreement. I don't want to make this too long so basicaly I'm asking if this has happened to anyone else on WoW, and if so then what is the permanent solution if there is one?

I would hate to see him give up and quit because of this.

THNX!

im no expert but 4 times sounds like someone hacked his pc and is running a key logger to get his pass. Have your friend reformat and get some kind of antivirus program. best luck to him!

how do we know this one not also might be hacked?  xD

But honestly, last option,  format your (your friend's that is, all "your is directed at whom it might be) main drive, reinstall everything while not connected to a network, have the latest anti virus version ready on a cd or something, install it run test, shouldn't find anything since you formatted the damn computer hehe, now you are safe from scratch now you can reinstall WoW and what not again.

Now make your pass hard as hell and be careful what you click on and visit from now on. But it's most likely malware on your/his comp.

In the end tell your friend to stop downloading pron and visiting fancy places, unless he's well protected by firewalls and anti virus programs.

Originally posted by Nivez

im no expert but 4 times sounds like someone hacked his pc and is running a key logger to get his pass. Have your friend reformat and get some kind of antivirus program. best luck to him!

Yeah this or the person in question has the security questions and information to change his password if he forgets it. Like CD-KEys and CC info.

 Sounds like it's probably the same people hacking his account each time. 

Most likely he has spyware on his computer sending the username and password info, along with a bunch of other junk, to someone overseas. It's about the only explanation for so many hacks and so quickly.

Best bet? Erase the hard drive, install windows clean, then install WoW.

Then, before you do anything over the internet, install some software that keeps track of adware and spyware. Viruses aren't as much of a problem as much as adware and spyware.

A good one is adaware at www.adaware.com. There's even a free version, but the pay version is more complete and will keep better track of spyware.

The only other possiblity, assuming you've confirmed there's no spyware, is someone using a password generator that just keeps trying to log in over and over and over while running certain algorythms. The only solution to that is to have a very long password, 20+ chars, have at least one character be a form of punctuation and do NOT use common words. The more nonsensical it is, the harder it is to crack since these programs are trying certain word pairs.

One other thing you can do is to see if Blizzard will change the username on the account. This would keep them from trying on the same account since they would no longer have the username.

One last thing, have him change his password every 3 months, basically every time the season changes. Many of these people will pick up where they left off on cracking accounts, so if you change it somewhat regularly, they basically have to start over. When they happens, they will give up on trying to crack that account.

I use all of these measures myself after a MUD account got hacked over a decade ago. I've never been hacked since. These are NOT foolproof, nothing is, but this should make it to where the time spent on it isn't worth the reward. They only want the reward and will go to the easiest place to get it.

"You are the weakest link." sort to speak.

There are a ton of prgrammes you can run, the guys advice above is probably gonna be the best method, nuke your HD and start again

Also follow basic security, Install Firewalls, Anti Virus adn the relevant stuff, (you can get these free from Filehippo)

Ensure the PC has a security routine set up (mine has Defrag once a month, AVG and spyware every 24 hours)

For regular checks I recommend installing teh following and running at least every 24 hours

Super Anti Spyware

AVG8

CC-Cleaner

As for password security? Ensure you use different passwords for stuff (The more important it is the harder the password) I currently employ Alpha-Numeric passwords to maximum digits allowed using non sequential digits.

They should also ask Blizzard to confirm the IP of the accessing PC at the time you got 'Hacked' if its the same everytime then they should be able to do something on this

hah, let me get this straight...... this fool uses the same user name and pass for wow AND ffxi? {{seperoth23 you are mine!}}

besides being someone i would not leave my pants down around im thinking its his own idiocy for not changing his password to begin with. i fail to see how it is blizzards responsibility to to cover up his obvious lack of security. i know people want to spook about "omg hackers from russia" but in reality it is something else. i doubt bogging down the machine with security software will do anything at all if this has happened 4 times. with a big enough .dic anyone can be hacked (only funny if you know). happening 4 times = probably tried a bot or something from a bad site and now that they know the login they can just hit him whenever.

no antivirus in the world stops the idiocy bug.

Originally posted by Qmire

how do we know this one not also might be hacked?  xD

 

But honestly, last option,  format your (your friend's that is, all "your is directed at whom it might be) main drive, reinstall everything while not connected to a network, have the latest anti virus version ready on a cd or something, install it run test, shouldn't find anything since you formatted the damn computer hehe, now you are safe from scratch now you can reinstall WoW and what not again.

 

Now make your pass hard as hell and be careful what you click on and visit from now on. But it's most likely malware on your/his comp.

 

In the end tell your friend to stop downloading pron and visiting fancy places, unless he's well protected by firewalls and anti virus programs.

Awesome advice! the only problem is everything you just wrote I have told him to do the third time it happened. The third time he got it back he totally erased everything from his PC and reinstalled the entire thing, in fact WoW is the ONLY thing he said he has on it, he made that his WoW lap top, thats what leads me to think it's a Content ID thing. I'm not sure what kind of Anti virus he has but I'm thinking he SHOULD have one, ill ask him. The crazy thing is they know when to get him it seems, it happenes every 3-4 months so far and theyu must know when he is online cause the always do it when he is offline and normally when he is asleep it seems. He has always changed the passwords when this happened to some crazy made up crap, just some random stuff that makes no sence just so it's hard to figure out.

The "Key logger" concept could be a possibility too though. Is it possible for his to erase everything from the PC and still miss something like a spy ware on the system? I didn't think that was possible.