Account hacked - what would you do?

Ok, so 6 years into GW my account gets hacked - god knows how, truly baffled, but its happened so, tough luck. No money, weapons, armour, no anything, everything i've worked for has gone. Anyway, this isnt a sob story, actually, I was thinking its kinda given me a new challenge and a whole new take on the game. I've still got my chars and the titles I have at least, so I thought it might be a challenge to rebuild it all.

So I was thinking, what would you guys do if it happened? Part of me says I've wasted enough time getting this far so maybe I should call it a day?

Is it time to move on?

Since you still have all your titles/achievements, it all comes down to whether or not you want to work again towards all you used to have (which is pretty much just money). It would really depend on how "far" you got, but if you're bored and up for the challenge, go for it!

Personally, if I was hacked now, I would still rebuild... Then again, I only have 1 character with an obby armor set and not even all heroes fully runed up :P

Since my activity is pretty low at the moment and I have 50/50 and the shit I need, if I lost everything i'd probably just uninstall and wait for GW2. But I guess it's up to you.

Your virtual items and currency should be the least of your concerns.

How did the breach occur?
Were your passwords too weak?
Is your PC vulnerable to unauthorized access?
Did you entrust your login information with someone who has a weakly secured computer or is someone you can't fully trust?

etc.

These are the questions you need to ask yourself and you need to ensure that you are changing up your computing habits for the better by learning from this experience.

I use Lastpass and Keepass, a reliable antivirus (either nod32 or Kaspersky) along with a NAT firewall. I don't ever use a generic password (no reason to with Lastpass) and I never share sensitive information with anyone.

EDIT: The weak link might just be a Ncsoft master account. Their password requirements are just horrendous (only alphanumeric and you can't start with a number, who does this?), and someone with access can change your GW password without knowing the old password.

I don't use anti virus, haven't ever used it. 5 years into GW without being hacked, let alone other mmos and steam. Its called common sense. I dont share or entrust my passwords with ANYONE and I dont use common passwords or ones with words in them.

Im banking on an old friend or a weak/predictible password maybe even stolen from a forum database some time back.

Mine got hacked and I earned my gold back starting off with farming Jade Quarry for zkeys to sell.

Johno,

Its a shame this happened. Despite what a lot of people say I am convinced some hackings are due to the rotten security at NCsoft.

What you do now depends on whether you still enjoy the game. I do so I would still play - one of the great things about GW is that you don't need expensive armours or weaps to play effectively. Runes are jolly useful though ^^

Good Luck

even though i didnt get hacked (sucks to have that happen btw, srry to hear).. i spent all the money i had on random stuff and guildies and started playing a secondary account.. which up till then was just a mule, so pretty much started from the bottom.. and it's a lot of fun again actualy lol... im at 6 years of GW aswell and didnt rly think the game would still be this fun if ur actualy working on a new char, instead of rushing one through just to get to that 1 farming spot u wanna try out :P

So.. Yea, i would start over, its fun

Its always sad to get hacked, but looks like it wasn´t the worst kind of hacker. You just got looted, they could have deleted your chars, used the account for botting and get it banned. Unless you are bored and tired of gw you should certainly come back.
I made a experiment a bit ago, pretending to be stripped of all, restarting with completely naked and unarmed char and empty bags. Lvl20 and all skills available though. It took me 20mins to farm outside ascalon to get starter armor, and then 2 hours of featherfarm earned me enough for max armor from kaineng with all runes (except sup vig) and a suitable cheap green staff bought in spamadan.
So it shouldn´t take long to get back into the game for real
Or you can challenge yourself by starting a new char from scratch and earn every bit for the armor and weps progressing through game the regular way.

Personally I would just start some simple farming, Rit feather farming to precise. Reason is you can do this entirely naked and without runes, just pit spirits on tengu in Jaya Bluffs. Sell feathers and use the runes you get to re-equip your main characters again.

After getting enough for armor and runes, I would move on to UW with Rit and farm ectos to gain enough money to re-equip rest of my characters.

I think i got hacked today, my password doesn't work anymore, and I see on a 2nd account that my main was online 3 hours ago.
I'm done with guildwars and GW2 if it's completely emptied...
6 years down the drain.
I have no idea what my ncsoft account is, so I cant reset my password...

Sell my account.
Wait, you have to do that in advance. Good thing I did

must be somebody from guru who did it

Sorry to hear that you have been hacked and even more sorry i am to see remarks like "don't share your password" "use common sense" "was your password weak ? " As you may find in other threads here on guru it's not always "the idiots" fault.
Indeed be happy that you still have your toons, others have had all their toons deleted.
If you have 50/50 HOM and done all in game that you want to do, it might be a good idea for a break and enjoy that weird passtime other ppl call life. I'm just getting into it myself and am kind of liking it. I have found out that sleep is kind of nice too when done more than 3 hrs a day.

I would probably take that as a signal to move on.
Delete my Paragon and Ranger to make room for another two PvP char slots and join a newbie GvG guild and only ever PvE to do a few things with older friends and continue to play Monk in terrible pickup groups for the ZQuests.

I am someone who offered advice on the matter. And I'm not quite sure where you are getting this implication that the victim was blamed, that was not at all the case.

Was I even in the least bit accusatory in my post above? I simply asked the OP to consider his computing habits and if, they are found to be lacking, to improve on them. In fact, in the very end, I peg the most likely culprit to be NCsoft's lax security standards.

It certainly isn't OP's fault that an illegal breach occurred on his account, but wouldn't it be foolish NOT to take an introspective look at one's internet and computing habits after such a breach occurs?

You really should keep track of these things. Why leave now? I doubt they can manage stealing your GW2 inheritance. Pop a support ticket up they will try to help you reclaim everything.

EDIT: @op if I got hacked I would pet a chicken. Harder than it sounds.

The time has arrived for NCSoft to tighten their security, too many accounts have been hacked.
My characters were decked out with every single armor, I had loads of high-end gear, 20+ r8 shields, multiple stacks of ecto's, some stacks of zkeys, 3 6th year gifts I just received.

At least I made 50/50 before getting hacked, sigh....
http://hom.guildwars2.com/en/#page=m...AAAhUYIAAAAAAA

Even PvP will be annoying without my r8 shields...

I had a friend that got hacked last week. He lost everything, years worth of work lost. According to Anet/NCSoft there were three UK accounts involved, all three have been banned. Where does that leave him, starting over. He has a long way until he reaches 50/50.

My account was hacked sometime last night or this morning. I lost ecto, a dedicated kuunavang, 6 frog scepters, a handful of celestial compasses along with random weapons of no consequence, like a pyroclastic axe, for example. Out of all of the pre-nerf staves on this account, they only took one of them, which was kind of special to me.

It's not the first time it's happened. I had quit the game back in 2006 to go to WoW and when I randomly tried to log in, found my account had been locked. I got it unlocked and some ecto and my kuunavang was missing then, too. I thought i was pretty secure until this morning.

My account was locked out via password so I rushed to kick whoever was doing whatever, out by locking them out of the account. I must have interrupted them but they'd already done a lot of damage.

It just seems sad that ncsoft has zero support for this and it's giving me reason to not want to buy GW 2.

The worst of it is that I had accumulated all of the mats to craft each of the destroyer weapons, had one tormented dom staff and exactly three oppressor weapons not yet dedicated. I would have finished my valor monument, at least.

People go through the standard, "Oh, you must have bought gold or shared your account info", but there are people never shared ANYTHING, being hacked. I think it's highly suspicious.

I know Blizzard has a huge problem with inactive accounts being damaged by hackers, so.. how do they know if your account is active or not? It's a curious question without an exact answer and does NCsoft have the same issue?

You don't know how many accounts have actually been hacked.

Any number of these people could be claiming they were hacked just to try and compel Anet to
establish a policy of replacing lot items to hacked accounts. There could be a whole army of
people just waiting for that to happen so they can give their stuff away and get replacements
from anet.

There are tens of thousands of others that would make no attempt at all to secure their accounts
if they thought Anet would replace their stuff if hacked.

There are thousands of people that have given others their account information... been hacked,
and just refuse to admit their own involvement.

I've been in dozens of guilds over the years where I've seen members give their information to
other members so they could help them transfer items between accounts. In one case I'd only
been in the guild for like twenty minutes when a guy offered to give me his account info so I
could pass some of his stuff to his other account.

How many accounts actually get "hacked" is hard to say, But I'm sure YOU have no way of
knowing that information.

OP

I'd be really bummed, but I'd stil play. There are still lots of people playing and a lot of the game is
like a new area every time you play through it with a new group of people.

hm, I have not finished my goals in this game (most of which have nothing to do with the HoM)...so I would be kinda (ok very) upset and would probably not play on that account again (and would not bother to buy any other products from anet).
It would tell me--its time to stop playing video games now.

yes I am suspicious about this. There does seem to be a large number of inactive accounts being hacked. I expect we will never know but it does look like at least an NCsoft employee selling account details - or maybe even company policy ^^

Are you being facetious? Because it would be an awesomely stupid allegation if not.

Well, from experience, I was hacked back in December. Mind you, I'm far from elite, but I just bit the bullet and resumed with my fun. If you enjoy the game, keep playing.

I find that hard to believe, i have been inactive for 2,5 years.
Come back to find all my stuff intact (*)

However, i do realise it is certainly not impossible

(*) My accounts were inaccessible due to the new security measures, but with the help of NCsoft i regained access within 48 hours.

why? well the last bit was facetious....but after my amazon account was hacked the resulting police investigation found an amazon employee was selling account details, and no I don't know how they got to see the pw's. But if it can happen at Amazon why not NCSoft?

The strangest thing happened today. I was in Kamadan, looking for things when someone whispers me with something they have. They open trade and it's a frog scepter, like my old one, that was stolen in the hack a few days ago. I didn't think about it at first, asked him how much. He named a price that was cheap, I lowballed him and closed trade. He relented, opened trade and sold it to me for my price.

I was about to leave when he opened trade again and started putting things into it. More frogs, and all kinds of them. I wasn't suspicious yet, but then asked.."Do you have a spawning compass"

He opens trade and puts in a spawning compass, r9, modded identical to mine, which was not 20/20. I did a double take and noticed the gold value, which was also IDENTICAL to my own, missing one.

I then looked up my earth frog from the thread I was selling it in and compared it to the one he'd just sold me. IDENTICAL gold value. Now, I know gold values vary, so what are the odds of him having several items matching both in req/mod and gold value to my own?

And what do I do about it?

You sound just like the kind of "person" I was talking about in my previous post.
Gave your account information to someone in a guild you were in and forgot all
about them until they came back to scew (is that an allowed word) you.

I joined a guild a few weeks ago that insisted that I use my in game name and my
email address to log on to their site. I used a "hotmail" address, they told me I had
to use a "real" email or they couldn't accept me. I don't even use my real email or
in game name on these forums. That's two thirds of the information you'd need to
steal my account.

Needless to say ...they they refused me into their guild. I feel lucky.

I recently had to deal with - PWS-Mmorpg.gen! - its a key logger to steal game passwords. I can say my pc is locked down tighter than a you know what. Luckily that saved any info from leaving my pc and my account getting hacked. Apparently this thing has been around a while but I had no idea about it so I want to share this info. incase there are other peeps having this issue.

It started about two months ago when I started looking for Tyrian maps to finish my cartographer title. I googled a few places looking for 100% maps and I read the cartography thread on here and dl'd textmod and some maps that were posted.

I have no idea where I actually got it but I did. I realized I had something because I would come here reading threads and randomly (sometimes within 2 minutes sometimes after 20 minutes) my IE would redirect to some other page. I would quit before it finished loading. But it was only doing it while I was on this site. So I scanned with McAfee, Spyboy SD and Malwarebytes. Nothing. It kept doing it. So I scanned again. McAfee finally did find it and said it quarantined it. So then I started getting redirected again this time only when I was on GWG2 forums! Scanned again with all three in normal mode and safe mode. Nothing.

Called my buddy, a pc guru, and he recommended smitRem.

smitRem found it and cleaned it out completely and I have not had any issues in over a week now. I ran it in safe mode w/networking. That way it can dl microsofts repair panel (don't know if thats the exact name for it). He said you need to be careful when using it because it can delete system files if bad things have attached themselves on them so have the OS cd handy to replace them if they need to be deleted. But it should prompt you first. Also it will clean your host file so if you have added any software updater ip's to block you'll need to replace them.

But we found it had buried itself in my external HD and changed some ip configs, etc... trying to steal my passwords.

All I know is without that program I would still have it. So this is for peeps who run AV and Spybot and Malewarebytes. It may not be finding it.

If your account has been hacked you may still have this thing on your system or one like it. So beware. In no way am I implying I got it from a link on this site, I'm just letting you know what was happening to me in case it's happening to you.

This is also a nice site he sent me to to test my router ports http://www.grc.com

Click "Services/shields up" and choose "all service ports" right in the middle of the page. It will let you know if you have vulnerable ports that you should address.

I've never given a single person my account information but continue to make your broad, generic and untrue statements about people.

If you put yourself in the shoes of the bad guys for a moment you'll realise why that is. They need bots, and if they hijack an active account the owner will notice immediately and have NCSoft reset the login info.

So what they do is, they get your login info (most likely via spyware sitting on your computer), then they check to see how often you log in. If a certain time has passed and you haven't logged in, they consider it "safe" to start botting with that account.

There's no causality ie. if you don't play for a while -> you get hacked. The way they get your info has nothing to do with what they will do once they get into your account and how long they'll wait to do that. It depends on other factors. If an account's characters have very important valuables it may be worth more to them to just loot them instantly. If they don't, they're more likely to lay low and use them for botting after a while of you not playing.

Finally got back my account...
EVERYTHING is gone... my fissures, my expensive shields, stacks of ecto's, cash, zkeys, everything.
I still have my customized crystallines, but that's about it.
I'm pretty RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing mad right now.

How did they manage to change my password??? Even I had trouble remembering secret questions...

Now that's a good question.

Something my boyfriend recommended, is to fill secret questions with answers that are actually not true and then to further cement the security of those answers by having them appended with gibberish. The answer has to be exact and unfortunately, it's easy for someone to find out things about you if you happened to use the same email for facebook, or something. They could easily find out names of pets, family, city you were born in, primary and secondary educations, etc.

Of course, you have to remember those answers too, which I'd recommend doing on an OFF drive file, like maintained on a memory stick or something.

I had my mothers maiden name as question, its only on her passport and isn't used elsewhere..
Something is fishy here.