I officially got hacked

Couple months ago 2 of my friends got hacked, although they had complicated passwords that contain letters and numerals it was no match for the hackers. They lost ectos, zkeys, gold and some of them got their PvE characters deleted. This raised my awareness to change my password every month.

I linked my account to PlayNC hoping to feel more secure. I also got all these anti-virus spyware malware whatever you get the point. installed and updated daily.

After logging in tonight I found out all my money and ectos were gone, all my characters were in Great Temple.(The hackers didnt delete my PvE)
They took basically everything which i spent 3 years earning it all disappear in one night. Including my favorite pet: The Celestial Pig

For those that encounter this experience I feel your pain. We all wish we couldve prevented this from happening.



The point of this topic is to raise awareness for others who didn't get hack. We should all gather and voice our concerns by emailing, sending support tickets and asking ANET to improve their security systems.

Clearly, ANET as a big company won't take responsibilities despite a lot of people that got hacked recently because it's a big company.

So I have a suggustion, why don't we setup a security system such as a security question after X attempts of fail logins. I hope I'm not asking much

Ok

1. Did you give your pass out to anyone at any point?
2. Did you torrent that AV program?
3. Do you use IE?

1. Nope, never give any info about my password out.
2. What's torrent AV program, well I don't torrent at all.
3. I use firefox

You could do all 3 of these and be safe too.

By 2. he was asking whether you illegally obtained your antivirus software (or any software really)

4. Do you use the same email/password combo(s) elsewhere
5. Have you registered to any Guild Wars related sites/forums/voice chat services recently
6. Have you been keeping up with Windows/Flash/Adobe Reader updates. It's kind of depressing how many things can open security holes really.
7. Do you have a firewall (hardware or software) or is window's firewall enabled?

Please forgive all the questions as we try to determine possible vectors of attack, as brute forcing a sufficiently complex password should take longer than a month. That two of your friends were hacked as well suggests a possible commonality - perhaps you all frequent the same forum or something?

Ah I see, the Anti-Virus is legit off AVG website for 30 bucks? can't remember

4. I don't have same email/pw combo since I change it often through PlayNC, I do keep my old pw for email which isn't same as GW.
5. The only register website was Xunlai Tournment House hopefully I get some Zkeys >_<
6. Flash player is 10 but adobe reader is not the latest one but still pretty new. I'm running on Win XP Pro 64bit.
7. Firewall is ZoneAlarm Pro (I gotta manually tell it to allow guild wars to run)

The two friends that got hacked had leaks of accounts not linking to PlayNC, but they do change their passwords often.

The complexity of my password could probably really take a month, but is it really possible to brute force that before I change it?

I also mention I change passwords every month, I didn't change it starting on July 1st due to laziness, which i regret.

Have you ever played on another computer? Just because yours seems to be secure, doesn't make other computers so.

The only way people could get your password if you didn't give it out and if you didn't have a virus is if they brute forced the guild wars servers and since you say you have a complicated password that would have taken a hacker something like a thousand years to figure out and I believe guild wars locks people out after a number of failed attempts anyways.

So you either:

a. Have a virus/keylogger
b. Gave your password out to somebody

There's simply no other possibility. If the guild wars servers got "hacked" there would be thousands of accounts robbed, not just you and your friends.

maybe your friends were jealous of you coz u were the only 1 who didn't get hacked and they seeked revenge

xD

Hi, I don't give out passwords to anyone so that should eliminate the possibility.

I do have a laptop in home that can't run games at all, I mainly use it for school/work. And about half a year ago, it was infected with microanti virus2009 (September 2008) when i was surfing around the web, i reformatted after. But the thing is, the laptop was in another city (far from where my desktop is)and my desktop was build during April 2009 which also eliminates the time frame possibility

Considering that you and your friends were hacked, that suggests that you have something in common. As your passwords were 'safe', it's probably a keylogger/spyware. What (probably GW-related) sites did you and your friends all visit? If there's one in common, we can have a (safe) look to see if it's a problem.

ps. I don't expect you to click OK on any installs popping up, and assume you ran your virusscanner through the whole computer.

Read this on security, run this to download anti-malware software, go here to ask for support on your issue.

Unfortunately these issues pop up sporadically and happen frequently in MMO's. There's no tracking down how some of these happened and what could have been at fault. This is a problem that affects most multi-player games. I encourage you to bring your issue to support and see what help they can offer you. Closed.