hacked account

my girlfriends account was hacked today... she lost 3 characters but none
of the items or money was missing. i told her to change her password and email
nc soft to get the problem sorted out, then about an hour later, the rest of the characters got deleted... AFTER CHANGING HER PASSWORD.

what the hells going on, can they restore her account back to the way it was?
and all this after a security update/maintenance

keylogger..?

They wont restore, they updated their security, not yours/hers. Probably something she downloaded such as a keylogger. She needs to virus scan her computer.

were both playing from home and obviously we dont give away our account information, (both computers next to each other). btw i just lost 2 of my characters also...

I suggest you scan your computer for any odd stuff. If you didn't give out any account information, it's either a key logger or some site you visited.

Did you download some "third part" softwares for Guild Wars to add stuff in the game?

the only thing we use the computer for is emailing, youtube, facebook and guildwars,and we dont download much also realised i lost my ele (my main) R5 koabd... wasted 1000+ hrs...

done a virus scan and nothing at all came up, using AVG
and no i dont use any 3rd party programs

hopefully this is just a big weird bug that ncsoft forgot to fix

Or one of your friend is playing a (very bad) joke on you. (sadly this happens) It's actually more probable than Anet (not NCsoft, who only manages support, not the game itself) making a mistake (not that they don't make any).

There's nothing we can do for you unfortunately, you have to look at security guides (I wrote one here), check where you may have released the information by mistake or overlooking something (this happens quite often, I've helped people who suddenly realise they left their password here or there).

One simple question: you did chose "robust" passwords didn't you? Nothing like your name, date of birth, GF name, etc.

I had my Steam acc. hijacked very recently. I'd dl'd nothing dodgy installed no warez or anything. Bloody annoying and still not sure how it happened.

Anyway, relevance to this thread ... I also run AVG and it was fully up to date and system scans revealed nothing. However I tried a few other apps and this one found a trojan and keylogger on my PC that AVG could not.

Perhaps you should give it a go. It's freeware.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

Edit: IIRC The infection was caused by a new Vundo varient.

I am sorry to hear you and your girlfriend have lost characters.

For your information: the security program I use (Spyware Doctor - full version) routinely blocks suspicious sites when I'm on Facebook.

It also discovered a "backdoor" that my other (free) security software did not detect, but of course I had to start paying for it to be able to remove it ^^

I made my choice: I would rather pay a little every month than risk my account.

Funnily enough, Google Chrome often flags this site up when Im logging on (prob due to some 3rd party ads).

You two just didnt have a fight and delete each others chars did you??

facebook sucks, I avoid it like the plague as its becoming as much a target as Windows for hackers, mainly coz people dont think when they are d/l the latest "attachment" on there.

This happend to me in March last year - in my case it was somebody i knew who vandalised my account because "they were jelous" and although I lost all my money and items (p/c on Q9 silverwing?) they stopped short at deleting my chars - they did delete my friends list armour etc - but chars were still there and it took forever for me to be able to reset my password. This was because of the linking to NC Soft -

So I feel for you -

However -

the mods will close this thread

they always do for hacked account threads.

Which leads me to my main point - maybe on GURU there should be a place that we can post this kind of thing without a mod closing it so that people can learn and share there experience. For instance I was convinced that I had a keylogger and went loopy trying to rid my machine of something that was not there - when in fact my sons 14 year old friends had attacked my account and they had my password! (yes dumb of me I know!). But then my experience with NC Soft - trying to prove I was the rightfull owner is another story.

For you - it sounds like a virus and I know from painful first hand experience that you will not get your items back. However I am interested in what your experience with NC Soft is like and if you need help or tips with approaching them feel free to pm me. It took nearly 20 emails and the resurection of my dead mother to get my account back under my sole control.

Good luck

Very good example Yang, what you actually did is paid for continuing to enjoy facebook (which is a terrible website ) without hassle. This is how real-world security works. Free stuff is good, but not the best. Quite a lot of small vulnerabilities have been introduced via Flash and Ajax implementations, some have lead to problems like these. Shiny stuff is usually not a good thing (I block most of it via NoScript in Firefox but it's not very user-friendly).

Security is a process, not a product. You can't really buy it, you have to take it into account during your daily life, assess the risks and work around them. Always (except for very few exception) make sure your password is "strong", as it is still one of the easiest and cheapest method of hacking (password guessing).

It seems to be more of a personal vendetta rather than the typical steal-your-account-then-use-it-for-bots logic. Have you upset anybody lately, or used the same e-mail address for a fan or guild forum as you do for your accounts?

I'd download Lavasoft's Ad-Aware and do a full scan to fish out any nasties.

Quite off-topic, but I couldn't resist to respond.

I've been working with free software, like AVG, for quite some years and I never had any problems. No viruses, no key loggers, no nothing. Just use common sense when going to site or when downloading stuff. Do some research so you're absolutely sure the program you're downloading is safe. It really isn't that hard to avoid getting infected... Just stay away from the naughty sites...

Guru does in fact have an article called Guide: Security Tips for Guild Wars players that is stickied quite prominently and easily visible in our Technician's Forum to help players BEFORE they are hacked. After your account has been compromised ONLY NCSoft support can help a player. Common sense. Which is why we have to unfortunately close these threads, please continue trying to work through this with NCSoft support as they are the only ones who can resolve this matter for you. I also encourage you to read through the Security thread listed above to better protect your computer.