Recent Accounts that were hacked

i dont know if theres a thread about this already but i havent managed to find one so i figured id make one.

im trying to look at this impartially but its hard, ill explain why in a minute.
the bulk of people who had their accounts hacked that one weekend that did NOT have their chars deleted but had items on the character loaded or storage account taken. a few people i know had this happen to them, some lost ectos, others lost valuable mini pets, etc. ive just heard from some people that Anet has tracked their items(or some of them, not all) and are giving them BACK to the original account holders they were stolen from.

now i dont know anything about the mechanics of what happened, how it happened, who did it etc but what i DO know is that as someone who has had my account hacked previously and having everything deleted, i am slightly disappointed that no action(to my knowledge) was taken to try to trace anything from my account. i understand that there were quite a few affected from this particular bulk incident but i just feel slightly disappointed, as im sure others will.

do you think this is fair? or do you think anet was right in their actions in retreiving some stolen items from this last incident?

I really doubt this is happening. It's a rumor at best. Anet has never given back account items and I don't see any reason that would be changing.

One of my guildies is one of the people who got hacked that weekend - they were only looking into how it was happening and a way to stop it. I can promise you that he didn't get a single piece of gold back. In fact, when he talked to Gaile about it, she said that it would involve a rollback of the servers, which is certainly not going to happen a month after the fact.

Anet cant track anything

Sorry, I'm pretty sure noone is getting anything back

I believe you're referring to this incident?
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...t=zkeys+hacked

This wasn't an isolated issue, it was a large attack in a short period of time.


Most of the time when people get "Hacked" its their fault somehow(leaving passwords laying around,giving them out,3rd party programs).

EDIT: Didn't hear anything about items being returned either.

unless someone is sending false emails adressed as an arenanet employee then yes, they are getting SOME of their items back.

Yeah, actually, I would put money on that being exactly what's happening. Like I said, my guildie has nothing back, and I really don't see Anet giving some things back to some people and not everybody. Happen to have one of these emails to share?

No... the poeple you "heard from" are simply misinterpreting this... "so we would like to get in touch with the players who were affected..."

They incorrectly presume that Anet getting in touch with them equates to Anet giving them their stuff back.

They are not going to rollback the servers 30 days.

Its easy to fake sender information for people who dont know what to look for in an email. If it says:

Subject: Hacks
To: gw.guru.com
From: [email protected]

It doesn't mean it came from [email protected]. You need to check the path the email followed to find the real origin. You best thing to do is forward it to PlayNC, since its most likely a second attempt to hack your account. There is no way for the items to be created so unless they are doing a server rollback for everyone you won't get anything returned.

Have they ever rolled back the servers?? I cant remember of a single time in my gw "career", and there were some quite wacky stuff going on

they rolled back the servers when all the runes got reset to 250g

i do not have the email as i was not one of the affected but i will see if my friend can give me a copy, assuming this is not some huge secret. as for your friend, tell him to check the email his account is tied to


according to my friend it is from the email address that emailed him originally in response to the incident(when people affected were asked to email that specific email address) so no, it is not a false email.

If it's possible for A-Net to track, find and recover the actual items that were stolen and return them to their owners then they should do that. When it isn't possible then the player should deal with it. Once ectos have been added to a stack, sold to a trader, sold to a legitimate player, etc, then they should be considered gone. However, if there is a rare mini that is still in the inventory of one that took it to begin with, then it should be returned to it's owner before the theif's account is banned.

This round of hacks seemed different than some of the past ones, and it might be that the items are able to be traced simply because the character wasn't deleted. I don't know, just speculation, but if the stuff can be returned it should be, no matter how many times before (or after) the stuff couldn't be returned.

Equity isn't always the best thing or the right thing.

So what caused the bulk hackings in Feb.? Was it from a keylogged Anet/NCPlay website that wasn't the fault of the victims? Did they get rollbacks on their characters?

I think you guys should just accept it and stop whining about it. If they return items back then it isn't the players fault they got hacked. Anet would never do something against people who can't fight there own stupidity's.

from what i gather, this seems to be the case. someone managed to track the accounts that took the items and took whatever was left over BACK and is planning on giving these items back. i dont know anything about who did it or how it was done like i said but its obviously easier than a roll back to retreive permanently lost items. so in essence, i agree with you, not much they could do or CAN do for that matter, for those who had everything deleted. but as for the fact that they refused to even try and blamed the account holders for the issue and that was their reasoning behind "lol deal with it", THATS what kind of disappoints me.

that being said, im glad my friend is getting whatever they retrieved back.

who is whining? as far as im concearned i was asking what people thought of the issue or if people knew more about it/had heard of it. everyone else thats seemed to have posted in this thread has thought it was either a rumor or not doable.

i would have a more concise response to this if your last sentence made any ounce of sense.

Where were you in game Feb 21, 2009. For people to get their stuff back, EVERYONE on EVERY server would be rolled back to that point. How many titles would you lose, or that elite armor you have picked up since then? Think of the uproar in here if a roll back were to happen over a "handful" of accounts getting missing items back.

The only other possible way to return stuff, ANET people farm all the missing items, and meeting each and every victim in an outpost and trading the items back. I don't think you will see that happen either.

Sad to say, the stuff is gone, no more to return.

That was an accident on their part, not indiscretion on the part of the users. Accounts get "hacked" like this mainly through reused passwords (steal a forum db and try the passwords from each of those users on the related Guild Wars account), active misbehavior by the user (downloading botting programs, macros, add-ins, etc.), and simple trickery (forged emails from Gaile).

It's not ANET's fault if a user invites someone to steal their account by falling victim to "too good to be true" scamming or actively trying to circumvent the rules. It would be nice, however, if the online business community and tech community would make a more active attempt to train the general public about this sort of thing. Just instilling a little bit of a cynicism in a computer user can go a very long way toward improving security, even in someone who has absolutely no technical inclination.

I ment that if people give away there password or use it on a site thats not safe they will be hacked because of what they did theirselves however what happened to these accounts lately wasn't because any of these things but was some mistake in security wich causes the Give-Back of some items.

it was "a mistake in security"? can you prove this statement, or elaborate?

i'd just like to say to all the people who have posted in this thread who are arguing whether or not ANYONE who has their accounts hacked should not recieve some sort of benefit from anet is just dumb. If your account gets hacked, looted w/e it sucks, you want your shit back, if anet can do something about it they should, whether that be in the form of all of the items you lost or only the gold etc. I know this isnt how it has worked in the past but in an ideal situation this is how it SHOULD work. I know sometimes its legitamately the person who got hacked's fault that they lost their stuff, but in my experience this has not been the majority of cases. For everyone else who has lost stuff, its frustrating and infuriating and its very easy to point the fingure at anet for some sort of assistance who basically in response will say "lol your fault u got hacked pz."

with that being said, i was a victim in the febuary incident, and through strict confidentiality with anet the persons who lost items in question were not supposed to talk about anything that has to do with how this happened or why or who, no details. This morning i did however recieve another email from support saying that they did track some of the items that were stolen and depending on which items were taken they might be able to give them back to the original owners (me).

To be honest i was suprised, i had expected my items to be long gone and didnt even think they would return any of them. I am still wary as to whether or not its going to happen, and will remain skeptical untill i see it actually happen. I dont really see how this sorta thing should remain confidential considering its a great thing for the comunity to know that anet is actually trying to retrieve stolen items and return them.

The thing that is upsetting as cacti pointed out, was how little of help has been given to people who have been keylogged etc and had their whole accounts wiped out. I have never had this happen, but several friends have had it happen and ive given the majority of my money and countless hours of help in an attempt to just redo old charcters with titles and areas etc. I find it slightly upsetting, maybe all that needs to be done is for anet to be a little moreinformative with individual circumstances idk. In my experience with what happened over febuary they were extremely helpfull, and even though it took a while to get my support ticket sorted out because of an massive overflow of support tickets, my ticket was sorted out in a timely manner. Its just that in my experience this is not what has happened to players in the past even though the severity of the incidents was far worse

yesh...i remember it very clearly. it was during the sorrow's furnace era. as forth fly said, it was because of the npc rune traders bug'd up.

While clearly it sucks to get hacked, or even just scammed in game, my feelings are Anet shouldn't have to waste time fixing it unless Anet did it. Sorry, but I'd rather resources go to preventing future hacking and developing the game for the entire community rather than recovering items for a percentage of it.

I haven't received any items back from what was taken last month. I don't expect anything to be given back. If they would have had any intention of doing so, I'm sure they would have already contacted the affected persons about doing so.

Knowing that they've finally traced back to and eliminated the source is fine enough for me, but you're gonna have to show me where they've said that rather than claiming you heard from a guy that heard from a guy.

In an ideal situation maybe, but in the real and imperfect world, what you'd actually wind up with is people who collude to trick ANET. You tell your buddy your password, he "steals" all your stuff, sells it, launders it through other accounts and friends, etc. Then you "discover" this theft, tell ANET, they ban the now emptied account that "stole" it all, give your stuff back, and now you and your buddies have twice as much stuff as when you started.

ANET can't differentiate between different types of behaviors. Any given victim knows more or less what happened, but humans are humans and ANET can't trust their account of an event anymore than it can the attacker's. Sometimes it's obvious what happened, but most times there are subtleties that put ANET in a very bad position if it takes on any of the responsibility for cleaning up the mess. What happens, for example, in cases where somebody buys a rare mini pet that was stolen? Do they just duplicate it and devalue it for everyone, or do they take it back from the person who had no idea they were buying stolen property? How does ANET address that "fairly"?

It may sound harsh, but your computer security is nobody's responsibility but your own. ANET has no responsibility at all to ensure that your computer is being properly maintained and monitored and, as such, has no responsibility to compensate you for any damage done on your account as a result of a breach on your end of the connection. Exceptions granted, of course, in cases where ANET's software actually causes or enables a breach.

In the vast majority of cases, we are not able to return items. This is for several reasons. When an account is stolen, goods are usually moved off of that account extremely quickly. It is usually completely impossible for us to identify items that are stolen from players with 100% certainty because they are salvaged, sold, or traded to innocent third parties.

In this _specific_ incident, we were able to track a _few_ of the items that were stolen. We are in the process of returning those few items to the small number of people who contacted us in the three weeks following the incident. Our support team spoke to these players via phone to help get us more information about the hacking incident. We were not able to trace and retrieve every stolen item for the reasons outlined earlier. Those items that we were unable to trace, we were unfortunately not able to return.

We were happy that we were able to track down the stolen items this time. 99% of the time, we're not able to do this.

Thanks for the clarification, Regina. It'd be nice if everything could be returned, but it's good to see that not everybody is going to be walking away from this empty-handed.

Good news Regina.
So it's safe to assume all the hackers were identified and banned?

thanks for clarifying regina, thought for a minute i was losing my mind as everyone thought this was somehow impossible lol.
like i said i think its a GOOD thing that youve been able to do this, and i was unsure of the circumstances.

I've never seen Anet give back any items, except for that 1 roll-back. Is this an admission by Anet that there was a security problem? Because the overwhelming response from Anet has always been to protect your account so this stuff doesn't happen and live with the consequences.

It also begs to question what kind of precedent they are setting. Now we know that if they act quickly enough you can get your items back. I mean this hacking was weeks ago, and they are now saying that nothing's happened to those items in all this time? They just have been sitting there and they can give them back? I think this was a bad move by Anet's part. I mean, I'm glad that they are actually trying to help players but this can only escalate and now all those past people who were hacked have been snubbed. Not to mention any future people who get hacked. What is Anet's response going to be to the next person who gets hacked and reports it within minutes/hours. By this reasoning of Regina's they should fully expect to get their items back if they act quickly enough.

I for one would like to know the extent of the security problem? if one exists at all?

My account was one of the accounts that were accessed (and i am a security paranoid person at the best of times) luckily i lost nothing because i store everything and pretty much anything valuable or otherwise on another account, but if there was something i could have done to protect myself even more then i would like to know.

On the other hand if it was a problem arena net/guild wars side then it would be great to hear instead of everyone thinking they are at fault some how.

__________________
Honesty is the best policy...

Going by that what would you say about items that were stolen from an account. The account password had been changed by the hacker and the account was linked to PlayNC so the PW change had to be done on the PlayNC site.
The PlayNC PW was different to all others as was the GW password(both over 10 digits in length and alphanumeric).
No keylogger was found on the victims PC and neither of the other 2 accounts on the PC were touched. Just the one linked to PlayNC.

Is that the fault of the victim or PlayNC/ArenaNet?

What happened between the time of the incident and today is that our support team has been investigating every possible angle in this incident. We're not going to discuss the details of the investigation. Investigating these incidents can take some time.

I think it's not quite correct to state that players "should fully expect to get their items back" if we act quickly enough. It's not necessarily a matter of our response time. If we're made aware of an incident five days after it happened, and we act fast to ban those accounts -- but between the time it happened and the time we were notified, the stolen items were moved off of the stolen account, well... As I said before, the vast majority of time, we are unable to recover stolen items.

We are working very hard to improve our customer support, and one of the ways we are trying to do this is by attempting to return stolen items when we can. The circumstances of this specific incident allowed us to recover the stolen items. Not to put too fine a point on it, but again -- the majority of time, we're unable to return stolen items.

I find it hard to believe that they cant track items. When my account got hacked last April, support did tell me that my account was accessed by an unauthorized person from Germany. Now if they can tell that someone from Germany accessed my account, Im sure they can see trades that person made.

Then what about the infamous 112 or w/e number it was, They could tell they accessed a certain area & how many times they accessed it.

What about the Real Money Traders? They can track Real Money Trades but not scammed accounts?

Now we hear that 1% of the people that got hacked last month are able to get their goods back.

Freakin BS!

They can and always could gives goods back, they just choose/chose not to do so.

Do you even read what Regina just typed...?

If someone was able to steal account information directly from the PlayNC/ArenaNet servers, that would be a critical issue. I'm not sure, if any company would admit this anyway.

If account information was stolen via keylogger or some other security hole in player's computer, it is like throwing you house key on the street and then complaining to the authorities because there was thieves in your house. In that case one must pay from his mistakes and learn.

I have played online games about seven years, but never encountered account theft.

Actually I was typing that AS Regina posted.

and nothing has really changed in their response cept "NOW theyre looking at EVERY angle" and "The circumstances of this specific incident allowed us to recover the stolen items."

I still think its funny they can track what everyone does in this game but they will not give goods back.

I'm glad that A-Net finally got to the bottom of this! Too bad they can only retreive few of the items that were stolen. Hopefully they banned those accounts to prevent them from stealing again!

To someone who knows, just to clarify things,

The stolen items are not going to just appear on their original accounts, right? From Regina's first post, I take it that Support has seized control of the offending account(s) and have found some items still there. And through those phone conversations(in conjunction with their logs) have managed to identify who some of those items belong to. The items are going to be transferred off onto a GM account and then physically returned to players via another in-game trade, right?