So I got hacked...my own fault but damn what a pita

[heffner]

You know what's sad? My WoW account has better security than my online bank account.

[thinus]

How do they "launder" the gold/gems though? Do they send the gold by mail to lots of different characters? Trade in game with other characters?

Theoretically Blizzard must be able to retrace the flow of the stolen property and ban all accounts involved. You would think they would examine the way in which they operate and come up with changes in how we trade in the game to complicate, block and easily track the techniques these bastards use.

I can see how a large amount of micro transactions can be generated to complicate tracking them and if they randomly include some legitimate accounts then you cannot just wield the ban stick with wild abandon. But they can also have only so many accounts under their control and once Blizzard flags an account as compromised all trades with that account becomes suspicious immediately.

They should also be able to detect a pattern in compromised accounts (the systematic stripping of characters) and if that is combined with a recent password reset on the account then maybe they should put a 24hr or 48hr block on that account to see if they are contacted about the account being stolen.

But instead of addressing the issue on their side they push it down to us requiring us to buy hardware from them. Much like their AFK flagging solution in BGs.

[Gorkette]

Just thought I would add another point to consider. Authenticators will still not 100% protect you. The code on the authenticator is valid for about 20-30 seconds. Logging into non-official websites using your authenticator can compromise your account, if they are fast enough to log in before the code resets.

[Solon]

Authenticator ordered, now that I actually have someone around to receive it when it arrives. I have been told that even typing delete and deleting a character from the realm does not delete it from the servers for quite some time. I'm sure Blizz will be able to restore your toons.
Somehow I felt that a Battlenet account was less secure than 5 old accounts.
Good Luck

[Jaws5]

So when you move your accounts to Battle.net , do you go to battle.net to lanuch your toons?

[Ualaa]

Instead of entering account name and then password.. and then authenticator if you have it.
You enter B.Net email and then password... and then authenticator if you have it.

If there is more then one account on the B.Net account, there's a drop down box to select between them.

[Iceorbz]

your characters dont get deleted, only hidden and rolled down off the page. They have to be innactive forever and under level 10 i believe to really be dleeted.

[Drizhal]

They launder the cash but the problem is, as many have said people are incredibly dense. They do not report things for multiple days/weeks, or they rarely play and don't report it. They were doing something against the rules so they don't report it for fear of being banned. So out of every lets say 50 accounts 10 people don't report it due to multiple reasons. They still have hijacked 10, in my case they charged my CC to xfer my 80 DK and unload all the crap (Also got a name change....why i ono...)

But anyways none got deleted, just fast and efficient ransacking. I think as others have said deleted toons are a proverbial twist of the knife...Toons 60+ Are never actually deleted off their servers (blizzards) even if you deactive your account (though I would be very hard pressed to test their claim). Anything under 60 will EVENTUALLY disappear but takes months.

But I am stalling converting the rest of my accounts into a BNet, I plan to use 2 bnets...why...I dono just cause 5 is to many and 1 seems to few but there is a silver lining to the Bnet, With a keylogger before hackers owned you completely once they got your pw and you retrieved it with the secret question, because it is impossible to change it, even through blizzard customer support. SO, if you ever do get hacked, you know you can actually change that secret question to help lock them out. Somewhat comforting....somewhat


Also I received this morning an email from blizzard report thanking me for submitting my ticket however....my email was changed away from my hotmail emai labout 5 months ago...it looked completely legit too

[Dramoth]

As I said elsewhere, a close friend of mine got hacked somehow...

He noticed it when he tried to log in (he plays every day) and he doesnt check his email account all that often tbh.

He did notice that he received an email from blizzard saying that they had merged his account with his battle.net account and gave his email address login name as XXXXXXX@yahoo.cr.

I said to him that it sounded like he had been hacked so we checked his armory profile for his level 80 toon and checked on wow-heroes.com to see what had happened to his toon... he only had a few epics left (mostly pvp and badge stuff, they didnt DE those). I had logged in to try and draw the attention of a GM to it because my mate doesnt get in until after 6pm GMT every day. I still had my mate on the phone talking to him as I logged in and shortly after logging in, I got a system message that [character] has logged in.

Told my mate that and he was going 'that aint me'... so I really ramped up trying to get hold of a GM and I think that I did get a GM who was playing his normal toon on a different server because I told him my mates toon's name and he came back and said that it looked like it was a bot.

Next thing that I know, my mates account has been logged out and new passwords have been sent to his email address. It appears that they didnt manage to compromise his email account.

I logged in to check and see if the hackers had got into a GB banker that he has and fortunately they didnt even try and access the low level toon... because everything was still in the GB.

In the end, he came out of the whole experience a wiser and (in game) richer man... they had been using his lvl 80 as a mining bot and he had about 100 stacks of saronite ore and 20 stacks of titanium ore. He got all his gear back minus the gems and chants.

I do believe that he has now setup his own battle.net account, but I dont know whether he has gone for an authenticator as well... next time I see him, I will talk to him about it

[Gadzooks]

Coming from a PC software background, I would guess the character deletion is probably done to increase efficiency. Let us postulate the following about account hackers and their methods:

• Efficiency is king.
• The more accounts they can hack and process into adbots or gold-accumulation bots the better.
• A person is much slower than a software-automated process.
• Software automation for fixed GUI elements is easy. Software automation for randomized GUI elements is much harder.

Presuming that, it follows that they would write their post-hack account processing software so it does a few things:

• Find all current characters in your character list on your most populated 10 servers (the game automagically sorts the server list so they show the ones where you have the most toons)
• Log into the level 80s, disenchant or sell all BoP stuff or worthless BoE stuff to the nearest vendor and send any resulting gold to a designated level 1 "clearinghouse" alt for that server.
• Repeat for the level 80's guild if they have access.
• Rinse and repeat for all other characters on those top 3-10 realms. Hell, might only need to do the top realm as most people only play on one realm. (Remember: efficiency is king.)
• Delete the char from slot X (whichever the processing software is set to use for its advertising/transferring) on every realm where a char exists in that slot.
• Create level 1s with random gibberish names in slot X.
• Advertise or transfer gold/gear/etc. on the level 1s on as many servers as possible.

I'd presume that's the basic method for generating the most "work" from a hacked account as possible within the short time period they usually last before getting banned.

You may be right, a lot of the gold spammers lately have been <charactername>wsjdka, which could be software tagging a level 80, stripping it, then erasing it and creating a spammer character.