Account Security

I find a discussion of this is in order. Incidence of hacking seems to have increased and there specifically seems to be an issue of hacking by gold farmers. I had been kinda shrugging it off, but now it's happened to a guildmate of mine, increasing my concern some.

How is this happening? Are users of only certain e-mail providers being argetted? I believe I read somewhere that the hackers are picking up account usernames from forum accounts. I suppose it would have been smartest to sign up for guild wars with a different e-mail than one uses for other accounts associated with the game, but I didn't have this foresight 4-5 years ago unfortunately.

Hopefully Anet will resolve this issue soon, but until then it'd be nice if we could take some steps as a community to figure out how big of an issue this is and what steps we can take to further protect our accounts.

If you didn't have the foresight 4-5 years ago. Then have the foresight to do it today.

Click "User CP" up above. Then "Edit your details". "Edit Email & Password"

Change your email....

This thread has been discussed to death. THERE IS NO SURGE OF GUILD WARS HACKS!!! People get hacked all of the time because of poor passwords, keylogger, or using the same email for a multitude of different things. I have not been hacked for the past three years by simply changing my password to a 9 digit combination of random letters weekly. I never use my game emails for anythings else and keep my firewall updated.

Anet has already done something about it anyways. If you checked the login screen to GW for the last few monthes there was a memo "Don't get Hacked."

I guess the people who get hacked failed to notice this final step...

Keep believing that. :] There are tons of people who were mysteriously hacked around the same time who were careful about their accounts/emails and names as well as their downloads. I'd much rather hear that you keep your antivirus updated, and you have a decent one, rather than your firewall.

@OP - You can change your email in the user CP on guru.
- Link your GW account to a master NCsoft account
- Change your password with a combination of capital letters, numbers and symbols.
- Scan for spyware, viruses and trojans.
- Reformat.
- Cry to NCsoft.

People who say t hat you only get hacked because of not changing passwords/buying gold ect ect

I think thats bullshit, I have seen so many people saying they have been hacked although they are actually in the computer business, and they are well aware of changing passwords every week/ not giving out info ect

its just very bad luck or anet fails

lol I giggled.

Afraid that's not my case; haven't updated my antivirus in seven months or so. Though another reason why I might not've been hacked is because I'm OCD on internet security.

A person needs two things to get into your chars: the email and password. As long as you keep both lengthy and random, you should not have any problems.

Yeah I'm actually really worried. There is obviously a huge surge in people getting hacked, I've noticed it in-game and on these forums. Something going down?!

What huge surge? I haven't really noticed anything. Just the occasional people who feel the need to let us know they got hacked. Honestly I think its been pretty steady, not a ton of hackings but just enough.

i was just thinking this few hours ago(infact i posted a thread on the site feedback) a growing number and concern of hacking leads me to think it has to do with specific email providers, or certain fansites being targeted.

CHANGE YOUR EMAILS AND PASSWORDS
never use the same password twice.

agreed lol........

I have known many people who got hacked and 95% of the time it is their best friend they shared account info with for years who becomes jealous or whatever and eventually steals their stuff. Too many teenagers + too few morals = never trust anyone in the game. The only guy I know who had keylogger on his puter was 3 weeks ago, and 2 days after he told me he found the keylogger and took it apart and found the server ip was located in France, sure enough, took me less than 5 minutes to find a French forum board with his r7 15^50 sword being pc'd (same gold value).

Getting hacked isn't so bad, they only take shit you can get back. Trust me it just happened to me. Money isn't hard to get back, posessions don't matter. You still retain your titles at least

Unless of course they decide to delete you hard worked characters in the process, which also tends to happen alot.

For egold farmers, that is shooting in their own leg... Last thing you want to do is to make potential customer quit.

Quoting support:

You were saying?

1. Player gets bored of farming for gold
2. Player watches YouTube video about infinite gold
3. Player visits link to get gold
4. Site uses flash/java exploit
5. Info is sent to phisher

OR
By visiting a normal site, with a new ad, that contains crypted virus, then running itself from your cache.

That's the thing, hackers are too smart, and we can't stop them, because they keep on making new methods, new stubs, and the AV companies are too lazy to make a decent protection like ZA.

I'm in agreement with the group that belive you don't just get "Hacked".

I've played GW from a couple of months after release. I use the same e-mail for everything. I have a few slight variations of my passwords, but each still gets used for multiple places. I never change my password. I used my PC without an antivirus for multiple months.

Either I'm bloody lucky, or hacks just don't "happen".

Then again, each person that has been hacked coming on GWG specifically states they never shared their passwords with friends or relatives, don't visit certain scam sites, never downloaded nor used any third party tools and they all have some sort of IT experience.*

Are they all lying or is Anet screwing up from their side?

*Sarcasm intended. But it's still a serious question.

They may not be either. It only takes a second of not paying attention to get one of these things. So yes people may not knowingly get a keylogger (or other such thing), but are they so safe while surfing while distracted (eg. under the influence of alcohol, watching tv) and are other members of their family who use that pc or others on their home network. Perfectly possible for someone whose account has been hacked to not be knowingly infected.

In terms of security, GW is better than it used to be but is still pretty bad. A few years ago, the client would tell you if the email you were using to log in was valid independent of the password. If you got someone's email, you could put it in the client and the client would give different error messages for an incorrect username and an incorrect password. Made it a lot easier for a brute force hack. Now you get the same error for either bit of info wrong.