My roommate is close to suicide as a result of his WoW account getting hacked and all of his gear being gone. He’s sunk an unbelievable amount of his life into it, and I would be surprised if there is no official recourse you can take to get your shit back.
Now, on the one hand, I am sure it is positive in the long run since it will get him outdoors and stuff. On the other hand, it just pisses me off on principle, and it did seem to be the one thing that made him really happy.
So, anyone had to deal with this? What can be done?
Hacked account- Unfortunately, there has been yet another recent rein of terror on World of Warcraft account holders. As recent as January 2007 another large number or accounts were compromised. It has yet to be determined what the exact cause of all of the hacks was. Many were believed to be due to keyloggers gaining illegal access to accounts via a Trojan-type virus on the account owner’s computer. Of course some are also due to the increased number of players who compromise their own accounts by buying gold or power-leveling services, sharing password with friends, etc. However, due to the increase number of hacked accounts, Blizzard is making no guarantees of restoration and many people are leaving out of frustration. It’s understandable when some unknown culprit steals something you spent countless hours of your free time working to achieve and the company you have been paying $15/month to says “Sorry, can’t help you.”
Blizzard can and will restore all his items, but from what I’ve heard from others who have had their accounts hacked, it can take some time (several weeks).
Best advice to your friend is to keep harassing Blizzard’s support team until they restore his account to its pre-hacked state. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, etc.
Something I’ve noticed is that the keyloggers have learned to hide the code in a jpg address. It looks like you’re linking to a screen shot, which seems to be getting a bunch of new victims. Now my rules include “never click on a screenshot link on the WoW forums.”
Tell your roommate to switch to Firefox with the No Scripts extension.
I’m not sure if this is true or not, but one of my guildmates mentioned that the WoW launcher scans your /interface/addons directory for known keyloggers before loading the game. Assuming that’s true, it’s reason enough to use the launcher rather than disabling it, even though it won’t protect your computer from all keyloggers, only ones included with interface mods.
I laughed. I spat food all over my screen, in fact.
But seriously, he should have a software firewall. External firewalls DO have
a major weakness: Lazy people use port-triggering etc. so that any program,
any at all, running on the computer gets the access it needs.
A software firewall of the right sort can detect when a new program tries to
access the net in anyway, and if you’ve got some clue, you check what that
program is. Of course, most of the drooling morons who play WoW aren’t that
smart. Let’s hope he’s merely an addict, and not also completely stupid ;)
I’ll let him know, thanks. I use Kaspersky anti hacker and that seems to work alright when combined with NOD32 antivirus. He has the latter already, so halfway there.
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to judge him (god knows as I sit here making yet another post on Qt3, I shouldn’t be casting stones).
But I was being serious that sometimes events like this can be blessing in disguise, if you use the opportunity. Doesn’t sound like that will be the case though, so I hope he gets his electronic loot back and at least doesn’t have to start all over.
Honestly Blizzard should provide “account insurance” that (for just a few extra dollars per month!) saves the state of your character once a week or something and lets you revert if you get hacked.
LK, make sure you tell him to be careful this time. Blizzard has a limit on how many times they’ll restore your shit. It’s three or four, IIRC. After that, they just cut you off. Probably assuming you are too stupid to be worth wasting time on.
They do have account insurance in exactly the way you describe. If you do a search on the main board, you’ll ind my brother’s saga on how his account was hacked and finally restored, around the time of BC release, complete with accusations that he really did do something wrong (his got hacked and then banned due to blizzard’s net policy of banning accounts that mail things to known hackers.) He got all his shit back, but it did take about a month. Make sure there are virus scans done often, there are tons of keyloggers out there just to get wow accounts nowadays.
Mine got hacked and I got my stuff back, although the greens I had were randomized. Apparently they can’t restore greens and make them identical in all cases.
The hackers, dicks though they were, didn’t just destroy everything they couldn’t sell. I still have stuff that you can’t vendor, like my mounts and PvP gear. I was able to play and grind for gold while I waited for Blizzard to restore, which took about two weeks.
No, I meant it the other way. Like if you knew him, you would count anything short of a mercy killing unkind. In lieu of that, we’ll go with getting him back on his drugs. Otherwise, he talks at me.
I just can’t imagine how it got through. I thought NOD32 was the tits when it came to these things.
