What to do after being Hacked?

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Yes it is dedicated, but it does look like they were in the process of shifting stuff as i have items for one guy whom ive never met. remorse? i doubt it otherwise they wouldnt have hacked me lol
but yes chaos and weirdness
i just have no motivation to play the game now though, like wtf can i do as the highest level with nothing, cba to go and kill a crap load of lvl 1 monsters just to get some cash :/

Got hacked yesterday, don't hope to get anything back knowing anet. My advise for people is to have a unique password etc. Even if you think a site is secure, have a different password for each one as I have learnt after loosing a few mil.
Just hope for the best after I guess and theres always guildys, if you were generous when rich, hope they will return the favor to a now poor person :P.
I just hope guild wars 2 will be more secure/better response to hacking. Anet could let you choose what country your account may be accessed through and simple stuff like limiting ip adresses that have access could reduce the chance of accounts being hacked.
My 2 cents.

Just hang back and flag henchies for a bit. In no time at all you will have some max armor and a collector weapon. It isn't that hard to get the stuff you will need to put you back on top again.

Thankfully in GW you are not equipment based for the most part. It is not like Diablo where if you got your Windforce taken away it will take you a year to get it back. You could even think of this as a new challenge. How long will it take me to get max weapons and armor back on my main?

Hackers suck plain and simple but don't let the b*stards win.

Yeah I see where you coming from, just sooo depresing seeing my beautiful warrior in nothing I really loved my black elite sunspear armour :/ I know it wasnt the most expensive but I thought it looked the best and all my lovely weps and my ogre slaying knife :'( haha well yeah ill try flagging those henchies but gold drop rates are lower so it seems like a massive effort but Guildwars is worth it.

Unfortunatley my guild is dormant in wait for GW2 and they seem to log on for a small amount of time nowadays just to see whats happening, grab holiday hats etc and they would help me greatly as they did completing Factions in like 2 days, so im on my own i guess

Does he has a rit hero?

Cause... you could load up your hero with a SoS farming build go out with him flagging and all.

Might take a bit of work but should be no problem getting you at least enough for armor and weapons needed for a decent farm on one of your chars. While farming might not be fun you can get yourself back up to your former level fairly quickly I'm sure.

I do infact have a Rit character which I use fairly often, what build would you recomend? and where to start farming havnt farmed in ages really

What I would personally say: Reconsider who you give your password to in real life, and monitor sites before you register at them if you get suspicious. I also run regular scans on my computer against anti-viruses. I have never been hacked.

Ultimately, getting hacked means you slipped somewhere 99% of the times. Even if it was only making recovery questions that are easily answered by friends or people looking at your social media.

I just made a small test, to replicate a situation where I was stripped of everything, but my main not deleted. That means, access to all skills and outposts, but completely naked and unarmed.
In old ascalon I let my ebon vanguard assassin kill stone eles, grawls and gargoyles. Took me 20mins to get 20 granite. Sold that to the trader, it enabled me to buy a set of 30AL armor. With that and lowlvlwep from drops I could farm feathers outside LA.
Goes slower than usual thanks to no runes and no good wep, but I made another 2k in 30mins.
Maybe 3 hours of feather farming at that rate would enable me to buy cheapest max armor, and a few more hours all the runes for it i want + some cheap green gold or green weps with desired mods.
So in maybe 5 hours you could rebuild your char from scratch and have it ready to do your preferred farm, doa, speedclear or such.
And then its time to try and identify the source of hack and attempt to prevent it from happening again.
I don't believe for a second that anet will give you any lost stuff back. The best you can hope for is that the hackers get found out and banned.

You oughta sort your priorities. Identify the source of the hack and prevent it from happening BEFORE doing anything in GW

Sorry for late responces i thought this thread died out, but this sums up ALL of our situations...

In guild wars you can live off 20k and be happy, yet people still attack probably multible account for the sake of it.

A small note aswell. When my account was hacked many weeks ago, i had to reset my password and everything and i logged back online to find everything gone. 2 weeks later after not touching guild wars, i log back on to find a note from Anet saying "your account was used to sell gold online, contact us now!" and again not being able to log on, meaning i was hacked twice in a row

And to the person who got their stuff back, that was just Gaile Grey being sympathetic when hackers wernt as common.

Most accounts that get hacked are for profit, not for kicks.

My gl got hacked over new years I find it odd that soo many people got hacked around that time. After 4 years of investing his time into the game he quit after anet gave him the finger and the whole guild did too its a shame that anet can't do anything worth while about this as its obviously not a small problem. The guild is now boycotting gw2 as well which was something I was looking forward to but it just seems like a waste since none of the guild will be playing it. Anet is losing players which means they should be loosing money but since it's a one time buy I guess that means they can just bend us over however they feel.

this
focus more on this

Exact same thing happened to me, someone changed my password and i didn't receive any notification about it. Is that a bug on Anet's side?

i smell an inside job
wonder if im next

lolz either that of they have disabled it

Same. I was notified when I changed it back but not when the account was violated.

It's little consolation but I'm told some account/s with chinese IPs have been banned.

Same here. I lost all valuable things, just 2 days after i got a golden minipet out of a birthday present.... sucks

I managed to get my account back using the ncsoft master account. After checking my inventory, I sent a report to ncsoft with information about what and when this happened. And I asked the question how this is even possible (I use unique passwords and i even have an e-mail address dedicated to gw only). I thought maybe they can find out who did this and at least ban the hackers account (sounds naive, but hey it's worth a try).

But instead of answering my question, they immediately locked my account and sent me a link to a FAQ about securing my account... Plus, i had to prove that i really own this game (Sending all keys, address, last 4 digits of my credit card, etc...).

The last response of ncsoft support was "A senior account support representative will contact you shortly"... that was 4 days ago and my account is still locked.

Ncsoft didnt even bother to reply on any followup messages...

So here I am, with a locked account waiting for any response from ncsoft...
I could still play, if I hadn't contacted ncsoft in first place. If this lasts much longer, I'm beginning to wonder on which side ncsoft is...

Now im scared that my account will be hacked .

So i changed all my passwords to different things and wrote them down in a notebook. So thanks also for raising my awareness everyone =p

Add me to the list. Account was hacked on the 4th of this month. I got an email saying the password was changed, but I didn't check my emails for a while so it went unnoticed. Still trying to get back into the account, but I expect everything to be gone.

I'm just glad I finished my HoM and solidified my rewards for GW2. If this had happened 2 or 3 months ago I would have been furious. Now I've just lost all motivation to play ever again.

BTW: I checked the IP. Originated out of Singapore.

EDIT: Got back into the account last night. The hacker salvaged my obsidian armor, took any materials of value and cleared out my gold stash naturally. He even went through my characters and salvaged the superior runes off the armors. Beyond that the account was mainly untouched. What I don't understand is that he either salvaged my tormented sword and shield for the mods, or just trash canned them out of spite. I'm really upset about the tormented items, I can't replace those easily and they were of zero value to anyone (customized). Its a good thing hackers cant change the HoM.

My GW account was hacked this week too. I tried several times to log in on the 13th but my details weren't recognised. I kept getting Code 227 I think it was. I did not get any emails to say my password had been changed.

Had no idea what was wrong was so sent a text to some guildie friends, one of which logged on and noticed that I was down as having left the Guild that same day (I am/was an Officer in my Guild) I immediately got to changing my password and got logged in only to find all my Elite armor's going including the Monk Obsidian armor (my Husband and fellow Guild members secretly got me the gold and materials to get it all, as a thank you a couple of years ago), all of my backpacks gone, all of my weapons gone, all of my materials and dyes, all weapon and armor upgrades plus about 200 platnium.

I have contacted support, but I haven't heard anything back. I'm surprised they don't reinstate stuff I mean if you have stuff dedicated in HoM that proves that you had them so no reason that they couldn't reinstate things, and even without HoM, they must be able to tell what you had on your account. Maybe its just too much trouble.

I'm really upset about my Obsidian, because of how i came by it. I doubt that ever be able to get the materials again to ever get it back. But not only that, I had materials saved to get weapons for HoM as still have a way to go to complete for GW2 rewards.

But apart from all that, it's almost like a feeling of being burgled, its an invasion of your privacy, its 5 years of work just snatched away and it makes me feel hurt and angry

Add me as another person who just got hacked this week. Had only one toon cleared out though, all the other characters were left alone for some odd reason. Only one toon wiped nearly clean and my storage was raided. All other characters were left alone (even my main).

Edit 1: Support has locked my account and is verifying whether I am the account owner or not.

got hacked too...lost 1000 plat and a ton of arm-braces and gem-sets...i couldn't be bothered to play again...there's no way im farming that again. Heh it was fun while it lasted but im done with GW

Ehh since everyone is saying that they got hacked. I might as well add myself as one of the victims.

I also did not receive an email that my password had been changed. I emailed NCSoft and they told me that gold sellers hacked into my account and blocked it. After I sent them some information about the account (like serial codes and personal information), they unblocked it for me. Everything that was worth more than a few plats was stolen. All materials from the materials tab were stolen, superior vigors off armors and also weapons. It's quite frustrating =/

When I changed my password I received an email to tell me of the change. However I didn't have an email before this incident about the password change by the hacker. I emailed ArenaNet telling them why they didn't alert me when my password changed and havn't gotten a proper answer (only that their system is very secure like banks etc...). I'm also thinking it's a bug or something from their side.

They also told me to scan my computer and check for viruses/keygens. It's the most possible way one could have gotten inside my (and the others above me's) account. I never shared contact information with anyone, never traded with an RMT, never sold real life gold, never traded with someone suspicious, etc...

I'm really worried, as this is the Second time that I've been hacked by the same goldsellers. I doubt my account is safe anymore. Sigh.

I had my account hacked on the NcSoft website and all of that was locked down. I was playing my monk at the time...
It took me a while to get my stuff back, but all I can say is change your passwords and don't have your master account pw be the same as your game account pw.
Also, don't combine game accounts into one master account either.

Also, never ever let your computer store passwords. Use the tools provided with your web browser to delete stored passwords after every session, you can set this up to automatically happen when you close the browser. I know you can't 'store' GW passwords, but that doesn't matter if you use the same password as GW for other sites. Use different passwords for anything like online banking, ebay, paypal etc...

And never underestimate the usefullness of a secure home firewall. Have your firewall return nothing if it's pinged so its invisible. We're so paranoid, we have two firewalls.

I used to be a UNIX engineer that specialized in hacked systems. Random bullshit passwords are the best. Go to a random name generator of your choice, plug in some silly answers, replace some of the letters with corresponding numbers on your phone number pad and there you go. Do you use a lock for a bike or whatever? Use the lock numbers with some letters.

Anyway, just some ideas.

P.S. It also helps to be poor like me, lol.

My account was broken into a couple weeks ago as well. I highly suspect it's because the same email login I use for GW is attached to two certain game websites associated with GW and the passwords were the same. This is my own fault. However, I really wish you didn't have to use your email address to login your GW account. I run my browser with Adblock Plus, I scanned with two virus scanners, and I always have FireFox clear my data. It would be nice to know for sure how my information was obtained, but I am assuming my information was taken from one of those two websites.

Lost my Obsidian armor, ectos, plat, and they even took my dedicated tormented weapons. I went through the whole useless dance of having customer service lock my account while I got them my CD keys, etc. Luckily I had most things in the HOM already and some friends helped me replace my weapons, etc.

Anyway, I had the same problem several others are having. I never received an email when my GW account password was reset by whomever took my account, but I did receive an email when I changed the password. I noticed that you only receive an email once you have actually set a new password, not when you reset it (like, if you click on "I forgot my password" link).

This happened to me in another game (LOTRO); most everyone has touched on it, but my experience with this is:

-Never make your forum password the same. I suspect this bit me.
-Keep a file of all of your product keys. It's common for support to ask for this, and it's a pain to dig it up when you need it most.
-Try to use usernames/email addresses that aren't all over the place.
-Never click on links that ask you to fix your account or enter information. Only enter your information on a site if you explictly navigate to it. Always check the URL.

These are some of the things I've picked up over the years of watching this happen. ANet/NCSoft can't help other than to get the account back in your hands, prevention is the best policy. I hate that there's people out there that steal accounts, but they're not going anywhere.

As for those that have had this happen to them, you have my sympathy. The one time it happened to me, all that happened is that everything in my inventory was sold, but the gold was still there. I caught it within hours (and they were dumb and didn't change the password), and the leader of our group there has my number and texted me when he saw odd behavior.

i got hacked a dew days ago too. i did not recieve password change notification, and i was on a break from GW because of exams. i was able to get my account back, and found out the hacker cleared my gold, and took my main toon weapon and tormented shield (which i dont understand why as they are customized)
i'm just furious.

What's lame is that you can't change the email address used for logging into GW; I contacted NCSoft support and they said theres no way to change it.

I got hacked on February 26th via my NCSoft account. Unfortunately, I didn't realize it until yesterday. When I went to login for the special drops weekend my password wasn't working, so I requested a reset password email, which I never got. I then went looking to login to NCSoft but had issues there too. Eventually I found an email from NCSoft on the 26th that my email address for my account had been changed. So they:
-Hacked my NCSoft account (somehow?)
-Changed the email address on the account
-Then reset my guild wars password via NCSoft

I have no idea how they got a Character name so they could login though, I looked through my profile here and don't see that I have my character names posted. i've been playing something like 4 years and in the past I know I'd posted character names for trades and stuff...so maybe that's how. A guildie can see that "I" last logged in 2 weeks ago (the day after they hacked me). Hopefully they just took money and crap and didn't ruin my armor/weapons etc. At least I've dedicated anything worth much in the HoM already.

I looked up the IP that changed my address and it was on the east coast. That surprised me, and makes me think it was likely a targeted attack (meaning someone who did some research and was able to find a character name of mine somewhere). I'm very computer savvy, working in IT for a living, and have of course scanned all my computers. Not to mention I can't remember the last time I've logged into NCSoft...so it couldn't have been a keylogger that did it for me.

I'm finding a lot online about NCSoft security compromises in the past, and am wondering if there isn't a current issue with their site. As soon as I get back into both accounts, I'm definitely unlinking my Guild Wars account if I can. My Guild Wars password was unique from any other by the way, but I can't remember what my NCSoft password was since I hardly ever used the site.

Anyway, just figured I'd add myself to the list.

I have scoured the internet and the websites I use for guild wars trying to find the link between my email, password, and full character names and I have come to the same conclusion at this point. I have played MMOs for a good 10+ years and January was the first time any of my accounts had ever been hacked into. I also don't feel my guild wars account is safe in the least anymore and won't until I know for sure how my info was obtained. I'm waiting for the day I log in and everything I've redone is gone again.

Was your NCSoft account hacked first as mine was? If so have you considered un-linking your GW account from it? I don't know if that's a possibility but I will try and do so as soon as I get back into my account. I'm still waiting on a reply from support after sending all my info in to have my identity validated. I asked them for any details they could give on how my NCSoft account was accessed, we'll see if any additional information is available.

They said that my account was blocked due to it being accessed by gold sellers. Does anyone know if gold sellers tend to just take gold available on the account and quickly move it, or if they raid the whole inventory too? (In general). I know every case is different, but I'm hoping they just grabbed the gold and ran. But they probably ransacked the whole account.

AFAIK they won't let you unlink your account from the NCsoft account. I wish they would.
And I think they use to take all that can be sold to npc's, rare materials, black dye etc.
After that they like connect a bot to your account and use it to spam the gold seller messages until it gets caught. Or they use it for bot gold farming.
With some luck your chars will still be there with their titles etc, they cant make money from deleting them anyways.

I assume so, I had to reset my NCsoft account password as well. Most of the replies I got from the NCsoft customer service were all canned replies and my case wasn't really handled personally, so I wish you better luck in getting information.

All I know is that if Guild Wars had a few things that most other major MMOs had, accounts in this game would be far more secure. This includes: an auction house, official forums, a unique user login name.

had my old account hacked recently, took all my minipets and deleted my skirt from my elementalist lol, somehow they changed the password but i didn't get a password change email like i did when i changed it back to get my account back.

don't care about the items that are missing just feel bad that anyone who was in there could plainly see my home address in the "change mailing address" option in "edit account"

Well, I turned out extremely lucky. I just got access to my account again and I can't find that anything was taken. I'm not sure how it happened but it looks like before anything was taken my account got suspended. I was prepared to login to naked characters today. I think that I may have had less money than I actually do now, by about 40 platinum or so. Though I can't be sure because I can't remember precisely how much money I had.

Add me to the list. /sigh

I'm still scouring my own network activities to see where I slipped up - but I think my NCSoft account was compromised first. I'm very irritated since I thought I was very anal about my online security in terms of keeping up to date on anti-virus/malware, and in keeping all my logins anywhere totally different. Obviously I wasn't as careful as I thought!

Add me to the list of those who had passwords changed *without* receiving any notifcation emails.

How can someone change my NCSoft and GW passwords without my getting a single email about it? I didn't even get an email when I tried to reset my GW password myself.

I know that in 99% of cases like this, it's the user who is at fault in terms of the account getting compromised in the first place - but why is there no explanation on the lack of notification emails? Surely that's one of the very first and basic features of any password change/reset facility? It's obviously gone very wrong somewhere.

Don't know how much I've lost yet (going through the process of getting my account back at the moment) - but I'm bloody lucky I have my guild mates on msn, who let me know as soon as they saw 'me' log on when I was at work. Hopefully I got my account locked down before too much damage was done.

I wouldn't go so far as to say 99% of the compromised accounts are due to user error. There have been some MAJOR security flaws associated with the NCSoft servers. I'm not saying that's what let someone into my account or yours, but it can't be discounted. I have little faith in NCSoft security measures. I would like to be able to unlink my Guild Wars account from the NCSoft master account but unfortunately that's not possible it seems. And be aware, now that you have a support account with them your ticket will eventually be updated with everything you send them (keys, etc) which is needed to verify you are who you say. So if that support account were compromised the scammer could really have everything they needed to pretend they were you to NCSoft.

I only received one alert email from NCSoft when all this happened, and it was explaining that the email address had been changed on my NCSoft account. Once they'd changed the email address, all that remained was to reset my guild wars password (and I received no warning email since the address on my account had been changed). Perhaps this is the same email you should be looking for?

My question is...WHY can those things (password, email on the account, etc) be changed without a confirmation email, if hacking is such a problem. For instance, I need to change my email associated with NCSoft, so I try but have to verify the old email account is mine first. So I click a link they've sent me to the old account and voila! As long as you have separate passwords for the email/NCSoft accounts you're secure. I have much more faith that Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo mail are secure against hacker attempts than I do in NCSoft. Anyway, say you can't access the old email account which is why you want to change it. Fine, but you have to contact NCSoft support at that point and go through the 50 questions about who you are. Many compromises would be avoided this way.

I'm not convinced it was anything on my part that caused my issue. I'm IT/security savvy and have scoured my computers to ensure they're clean. Honestly, I had forgotten my NCSoft master password, because it had been so long since I'd used it. And no other accounts, anywhere, had been compromised, so there was no keylogger on my machine. Anyway, I've started writing suggestions for NCSoft/Guild Wars security, and will post them soon to a new thread. I'm hoping to get feedback and more suggestions from other players, and to eventually send it on to NCSoft in hopes they will pay some attention to more simple security measures that they should already be taking.

I wish I were a fly on the wall in the server rooms at NCsoft...I'm incredibly curious about what security measures they actually are using.

Anyway, good luck with your account. Hopefully your situation will turn out like mine and you won't loose much, if not anything.

Kara

My account got hacked too lost a ton of stuff, obby armor, tons of weapons which I had collected over the ages, all my materials. I can consider myself lucky because my sin had enough ectos on her to get me on my feet plus a few other things. However I must of catched a case of the stupid as it was pretty obvious that my sin was used for botting purposes at primeval tombs because my account was banned for botting. What did I decide to do after unlocking my account? You guessed it, farmed tombs, 10 minutes later dhuum came outta the ground and cut me a new one . Working on reclaiming my account. Again.

I blame myself for not using a strong password, but I HATE myself because I had enough money to get 45/50 in HoM and I didn't.

edit: I think they got me through this website though as I'm pretty sure I had my main char's name under my username