Hackers: What's Their Deal?

I can't think of why you make it sound so easy for them to get our account information, before I read this I thought it was just carelessness.

Now I'm thinking what if there's a conspiracy!?

MAYBE A MEMBER OF STAFF IS CORRUPT AND SELLING OUR ACCOUNT INFORMATION TO THE GOLD SELLERS OHES NOOOES!!!!!!11111111

Lulz.

Serious note, I'm super cereal.

What miffs me off more than anything is the Anet tend to completely blame the account holder for their account being Hacked. Looking through posts it seems that 90% of the time it has come from RMT or hackers gaining access through NCsoft master account as there is little or no security against brute force or retries on passwords. they definately need a lockout system in place.

Also in previous posts people have said that there has been items deposited onto their characters. Each item in game has its own code as do your characters. These codes can be tracked to wherever they are in game on the servers. My assumption is with hackers deposting certain items in players accounts, this could enable certain people to keep check on that item and then let them know that the account has already been fleeced and they do not need to gain access to it again in the near future. Saves them time and money hacking the same account.

Before people ask yes I had my account hacked and lost mostly everything my only grace was that my four year old chars where not deleted(every persons nightmare). Of course anet insistance that they had accessed my account through my pc to which I have contiually asked for proof. Also at no time have the divulged as to who and how it was hacked.

For anyones info; I am running Norton 2010 Anti virus and internet security professional. A router that is firewalled and also running port listening software in the beckground. As an avid online game player security is at my upmost concern.

Yet Anet have the cheek to insist it is always the game players fault

I rest my case.

Gaile told me they can't pursue the RMT'rs because of legal issues with them being out of country that ANET operates in which is the USA, most RMT comes from China.

Still waiting on the answer about the blatant hackers though, the ones that I'm sure live in the USA that hack other people's accounts. I mean... something legally could REALLY be done if anet wanted to (as I've stated, they are hacking a personal account commiting a theft at the same time by stealing stuff), but IP spoofing...blah blah blah...

Anet always holds the "it's your fault" thing against you but as far as I'm concerned it deserves legal action. Btw, you see people be stupid in real life and get their stuff stolen because of their own fault...but you see them take action and sick the cops after the thief, it's also a crime with bank accounts of course.. hell even email accounts..its all a CRIME so why not game accounts? I feel gamers are strongly discriminated against by the own game company themselves. Simply because they hold against you that its your choice to "waste time on a silly game" and "we got your money so it don't matter" bullshit when spending hours of your life to build a game account to enjoy is just like anything else you spend time to work on and enjoy in the end.

No I just got hacked and all I do is grind and play. No one has access to my computer, my account nor passwords. For anyone who gives this information out they aren't to bright and probably deserves what they get. I don't download or install guildwar programs. As I said in my topic they tried to blame it on a brand new install of Win7 without GW even being installed. So win7 comes with a keylogger . Microsoft might be bad but they are not that bad!

Here's a discussion point - are the hackers / gold buyers creating a downward spiral? Do you think that people, once hacked, are more or less inclined to use a gold selling service? If they've lost everything they've built up over their time in GW, do you think people are likely to take the "easy way" and spend a few dollars to get them back to where they were pre-hack?

(Note, this isn't a question about the ethics of it - it's not about people spreading the misery instead of just sucking it up, posting a qq thread, and ragequitting - just wondering if ANet's refusal / inability to resolve these issues is making them worse)

I'll be blatently honest... after I was hacked and my account lost everything I did consider buying gold. I only considered this for a minute or two.. and it probably wasn't even a serious thought, as I quickly dismissed the idea. Why would I not only have all my in game wealth stolen by these people but also hand them my real cash too?!

I can easily imagine though, that for some people the temptation to regain their previous wealth the "easy" way may be too much to resist.

This is self-defeating though. The only way to beat these people is for no one to buy gold, but how do you stop that?

I've just had an embryonic idea whilst typing this:

What if every trade was automatically checked for things such as:

1) High value one way trade – i.e. Nothing of high value being given in exchange. This would need some kind of "rough value" table being drawn up of items that do change hands for a lot of gold or ectos.
2) Multiple smaller amounts of gold/ectos being handed over within a short time frame totalling a large value.

If the trade appears to be a "gold seller" unbalanced transaction, the trade could simply be blocked.

Trades between characters on the same account, or accounts on the same master account would be exempt from checking.

Also trades between players in the same guild could be exempt from being checked after a player has been in that guild for two weeks (for example).

I would not suggest that accounts be auto-suspended or banned though. Simply introducing a very large degree of uncertainty as to whether the gold buyer is going to get what they have paid real cash for should be enough.

One immediate thing that comes to mind would be for example, someone wins a forum competition with a high value.. How would that be dealt with? or someone wants to pay for a high value art commission?

I'm sure that there are things I haven't thought of, as I am really just thinking aloud.

Till tonight, I also thought (like some posters in this thread) that the people who were hacked made some slip, allowed some slack in their Internet security and they had nobody to blame but themselves. Well, I was wrong. I've been hacked as well. The hackers robbed me of money, took off my FoW armour (from my four years old character), weapons, minipets, you name it.

Believe me or not, I'm very security conscious; I don't give away my information, I don't visit goldselling sites, I have a very rigid antivirus resident program and a firewall; in short, everything that it required to do, I've been doing. Yet it hasn't helped.

There is some hole in the password retrieving procedure or data transfer from the client to the server. I cannot find any other explanation.

There is the Sale of Goods and Services Act...

We have purchased an account and we, as the customer have the right to expect it to be of a certain standard and security is priority. Many of the people who have been unfortunately hacked have taken the precautionary measures of protecting their computers and as far as we are aware, there have been numerous compromises over the past 4 and a half years.

I'm not saying Anet are doing a poor job, they're providing a standard, a basic password protected account. But they haven't updated or changed their approach to RMTs and just result to "terminating" their accounts.

I've been in contact with the Support team and i've had two GMs reply to me, one says he will look into my logs and check for conclusive evidence that i was hacked. if there is, they will terminate that account....
Do they not even know how RMTs are scheming against them??
The second GM (i believe to save their own ass) posted about how if i keep my password complex and secret, i shouldn't be hacked. Next followed a list about not using third party programmes and don't tell your friends/family... All generic.

I'm not so much bothered about how they are lecturing me about basic knowledge, but more on how they are not addressing the real problem of RMTs. I'm sure they know that these guys muddy their trades through several accounts and yet they tell me they will terminate that "account". singular. uno, ein, one.

Again, there has been no communication with the community about our account security and how they are helping. It's not as simple to tell customers to create a unique password and apply no further security.

Well I always thought anyone who bought gold were worthless pieces. I have since been hacked. I decided to buy some to get all my stuff back but at the last min I decided to delete my account. This happened once how long before it happens again. As far as I know it could be an inside job since they wont give me the ip address of who did it.

3 day grace period, if you got hacked maybe GW will get their act together and let you have access to your account to stop it before your 3 days are up. If your item is locked in and price is locked in who really cares if you have to wait 3 days

If its a good legit trade then it goes automatically after the time period .

I got hacked too w/ error 227! hmmm this sucks i cant even link it to plaync this is pretty gay. oh well time to move on with my life anyways spent over 3k hours on this dump. kinda sucks though i had to lose the account in such a way cause i never did any illegal crap.

Should make my introduction as well as my leaving message. Just got hacked too. Have been playing for 2 years and everything is wiped. Someone in my guild mentioned that a few of the websites for Guild Wars had threads so thought I would add my story as well.

Didn't know websites like this were there for Guild Wars so I'm a little sad to see them now that I'm leaving. Would have helped a lot to know there were sell stuff and auctions considering that GW doesn't have them.

Anyway, it was an awesome 2 years.

Nah, I'd think at this point in the game's lifespan if someone's hacked they're either going to jump on the SF bandwagon or quit the game. I'm not sure people really want to invest in a game that's going to be obselete in two years. As far as Anet's ability to resolve the issues, it has pretty much created a suck it up and start over , or quit the game atmosphere.

But you thought right. It's carelessness, ignorance, and stupidity.

Keep your details private and use a good antivirus like Kapersky or (if you want to be utterly secure) BitDefender, and you will not be hacked.

I realize how frustrated some of you must be, but there's nothing we can do on this site to help. You must go through support.

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