This seems to happen at least once a year. For those who are paranoid (hey, you have every right to be) I'm going to review the incidents that have happened.
The last slew of "hacked" accounts was on 05/05/08... this was a specific hacking that went around involving 2 accounts that were used to hack into players accounts. It was suspected that the guilty party were using a key logger or a fake website to obtain account information.
Anet was very helpful in this case and reported that they had banned the accounts.
There was another incident right after this on 05/28/08. Anet stated that they did not see any increase, more then normal, in hacked accounts. They always say that if it was a problem it would be more widespread. See below for more on that.
The hacking incident that parallels this one was actually about 2 years ago. We had at least 25+ reported hacks. Zkeys being stolen and the like. Here was
Anet's response:
Quote:
You're asking us for far too much. You're asking us to protect the player from himself. Forgiveness is divine, but covering someone's patootie if he shares an account with a friend, if he uses a weak password, if he downloads a third party program is asking too much.
If your car is stolen, do you contact GM to replace it? GM builds the cars with secure door locks, and security systems, and you're responsible for using the door locks and the security systems. If you forget to lock up, if you give your keys to someone else, the loss isn't at the car manufacturer's head, but at yours. Give you ATM card to someone, and write your PIN on the back? I don't think the bank is going to say "Oh, that wasn't you? Well, here, have that 500 bucks back, by all means!"
I ask this: Players must accept responsibility for all that they can and should be responsible for. We will gladly accept responsibility for all that we can and should be responsible for. In fact, we do, every single day.
In the last couple of weeks, there have been, what? Five threads about account thefts? One every couple of days, out of how many accounts? Millions? While I sympathize with those impacted, believe me, that's tiny. This isn't a "major issue," this is the proverbial drop in a bucket.
Now, I am not minimizing the loss of the players involved. I am simply pointing out the hysteria, and the cries of "Change this!" and "Give us that!" in the name of "making us more secure" is entirely unrealistic. It's like hearing a match was struck three states away and demanding a firetruck in your backyard.
Player, hear the facts! You are responsible for your security, and nothing that has been pointed out in any of the recent thread leads me to believe that the extraordinary measures you demand would have prevented a single instance of account theft so posted. In fact, if you read carefully, some of those affected have come to the conclusion that their security may have been, or even was , somewhat lacking. Players truly do need to take their individual responsibility to heart, rather than asking for more and costly tools that still do not prevent the loss of accounts when teh accounts are not properly handled, maintained, or secured by the players themselves.
Thank you for reading, and please understand, this isn't a brush off, this is a rallying cry for a more security-oriented mindset for all of us.
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And Skullcrasher, it's suggested every single time. You'll get a mixed response of people that do and people that don't. For all the people that swear they use great passwords and protect themselves, even on Guru I can tell you that there are over 900+ forum users who have "password" or their username as their password. VBulletin has a great lil' feature that displays the # of vulnerable accounts (no it doesn't give me access to view which accounts). So yes, from that alone you can just imagine how many people do the same with their Guild Wars accounts. I am, of course, not suggesting that those above were careless or that this is even them but it shows you that many players do not secure their accounts. Why does this keep happening? It happens in all games. Go to any MMO forum and you'll see reports of hacked accounts. Sometimes you will never know why. With every safeguard in place, it seems that some are still vulnerable. Which either tells us they are smart and subtle or that there is no protection. Forums can be hacked, yes. Though I can tell you that our server admin has been on our servers for the past 3 straight days and I can assure you that no suspicious activity happened. Game clients can be hacked, yes. Good luck getting any developer or company to admit to this unless it's catastrophic.
And just to answer all the other questions, because they come up every single time...
No one, not even an admin has access to the password you use on this site. To be more specific VBulletin uses a non-standard encryption method. Consisting of taking the md5 hash of the password, concatenating a salt string and taking a second md5 hash. What does this mean? This is a multi-encrypted password that no one can read.
