ok i'll "bear" with you, you mean care bear with you? I'll bear with you as soon as you learn how to spell the word "bare"
I'd prefer if you didn't get naked with me, thank you very much. The word is spelled bear like in the word bearable. The word bear can be either a noun or a verb. As a noun it can be a name or an animal as well as other things (I'm pretty sure in the show Doug there was a character that always had a bag of pastries with bear-claws in them).
As a verb, "bear" means to carry or to support. When I said "Bear with me" I'm literally asking for yall to support me with my thought. In this case I wanted people to explain why there are so many posts about people being hacked in WoW.
-------- "Chemistry: 'We do stuff in lab that would be a felony in your garage.'"
The most awesomest after school special T-shirt: Front: UNO Chemistry Club Back: /\OH --> Bad Decisions
ok i'll "bear" with you, you mean care bear with you? I'll bear with you as soon as you learn how to spell the word "bare"
I'd prefer if you didn't get naked with me, thank you very much. The word is spelled bear like in the word bearable. The word bear can be either a noun or a verb. As a noun it can be a name or an animal as well as other things (I'm pretty sure in the show Doug there was a character that always had a bag of pastries with bear-claws in them).
As a verb, "bear" means to carry or to support. When I said "Bear with me" I'm literally asking for yall to support me with my thought. In this case I wanted people to explain why there are so many posts about people being hacked in WoW.
LoL ok, well i gave my reasons why people are getting hacked. It is the data base addons like gatherer, gear score, and wow head. The ones that take information off of your computer or when you log in the game. They have it in their database.
I had my account compromised and closed by Blizzard on account of hackers.
I'd not played for almost a year prior to such happening (around the battle-net account switches), and I'm definitely (I promise) more internet savvy than the people who claim only the "unsavvy" are prone to being hacked (and the like). I've been playing MMO's since the Mythic days, and I've never had an account compromised in 10+ years of gaming. The fact is, it's a big game and because of that it attracts more than just gamers. While it's unfortunate that I lost my account and all of my characters, and that Blizzard has only managed to respond once or twice to my emails, i'm glad the account was closed for my security.
But yeah, anyone who thinks that the only people being hacked are scam-mail fondling idiots, is surely a tunnel vised and equally filthy wanker.
I am in a similar situation. I played for a couple years, quit and then started a new account recently and I am hacked within 2 weeks. I dont browse porn, DL addons, buy gold, or frequent unsavory sites and yet I am hacked. They deleted my character and made a bunch of characters on many different servers. I am trying to get it fixed but really asking my self if this game is worth all of the hassle with so little support from Blizzard.
A Cataclysm Beta Invitation in my Inbox? This is the third one! I hope this one isn't fake, I've already sent my information to all the others.
Wow! This site just gives me gold for money? Awesome!
Oh, boy! I can get people to power level me to 80! I'll just submit my account information.
It happens.
Oh, it happens.
My WoW account has been hacked. Never opened an email by or about Blizzard/WoW. Only look at emails I'm personally familiar with and check all links within emails before clicking them. Never purched gold or paid someone to level a character on my account. Am I still an idiot?
I think the main reason is probably some sort of a security issue with Battle.net. Outside of that, I believe another reason is because of the sheer amount of players who play WoW. The game simply attracts more hackers.
I recently got hacked in WoW too. Hadn't used the account for several months, either. Never give out my password, use any plat or powerlevel sights, nor visit adult sites. I have played EQ for 10+ years and never been hacked there. I am always up to date on anti-virus, firewall and anti-spyware software.
The one thing I will say is once I reported things to Blizzard and they investigated they did restore all the gear and money for my hacked characters. So I am happy about that. I still am a little unnerved about being hacked in the first place.
I recently got hacked in WoW too. Hadn't used the account for several months, either. Never give out my password, use any plat or powerlevel sights, nor visit adult sites. I have played EQ for 10+ years and never been hacked there. I am always up to date on anti-virus, firewall and anti-spyware software.
The one thing I will say is once I reported things to Blizzard and they investigated they did restore all the gear and money for my hacked characters. So I am happy about that. I still am a little unnerved about being hacked in the first place.
You got lucky. When I got hacked, I reported it. Got sent a reply that things have been taken care of and well.....still have a banned account.
It's because they have an anti virus/anti spyware program and rely on that to keep them safe.
It's because they have an authenticator and believe it will keep them safe, because the company that sold it to them said so.
It's because they believe every email relating to the game is kosher.
It's because their super secret password, "passw0rd", is so obscure, it can't possibly be guessed and connected to their email address that is only known by users of public forums.
Pick a reason. None of them matter anyway. If they want your account enough, they'll get it eventually.
It's similar to being chased by a hungry bear. You don't have to outrun the bear, just the person next to you. As long as there are easier accounts to "hack", you're probably going to be safe.
Originally posted by Baruno Almost every post here claiming that only idiots are getting hacked are from people who aren't playing WoW, or haven't converted to using battle.net. Coincidence? Blizzard has a security problem. I'm a veteran of 10+ MMORPGs and a LOT of other online things - the only time I've ever been hacked was this Spring when my months-inactive WoW account was suddenly suspended for ilicit activity. The last time I had played was a few times last Fall when there was a free 10-day promo offer for the new expansion. And guess what else? I had to convert my account to battle.net. Hmmm. I'm a software developer, been on the Net since the '80's, am running M$'s virus scanning tools, check my system for with HijackThis and other tools all the time, bla bla bla; I'm no security wizard, but I know what I'm doing, in general. It's unlikely that I got phished or trojaned. I know a few people in RL who play the game, and almost ALL of them have had their accounts hijacked at some point. They're all using the hardware-based thing the Blizz offers now, as they are convinced that there's someone inside of Blizzard leaking this info, and therefore the only way to truly secure your account there is to have a constantly changing password. I'm inclined to agree with a previous poster who said that those of you blindly thinking that Blizzard can do no wrong because of the size of their operation really have your heads in the sand here. They have a problem in their operation somewhere, and they really need to get a handle on it before it gets more publicity than threads like this are providing.
THIS ^^^
Granted, there ARE cases of people being idiots (going to suspicious websites, clicking on suspicious email links, giving away their account info, getting a keylogger, etc.).
Ever since Battle.net came into force. This is becoming not the case. There have been rumors that a blizzard employee has gone rogue selling account information and that an internal fraud specialist was recently hired. Of course, what goes on in Blizzard is kept hush hush as they want to retain their flawless company image and always blame the user in any case of accounts being compromised.
I current play US WOW. I started playing on this account Jan 2009. I'm a guild leader of two guilds on both Horde and Alliance at the server I play on. I've played MMOs for the past 10 years (never had an account compromised) and been using the Internet for the past 15 years. I also build computers for a living. So when I get some random whisper to say to goto a suspicious website or receive an email from "Blizzard", you bet I am cautious every time and very wary of the latest scams (not to mention laughing at the obvious ones).
Late last year, my EU account - that I created in 2007 and retired at the beginning of 2008 - was compromised. I had friends from EU making a trial account on US to come contact me about it. The account had been inactive for almost two years and was NOT signed up to Battle.net. Needless to say once the "hacker" got a hold of the account, they quickly added it to their battle.net account, clean out the account and went on a superman hack mining spree until banished.
Now this account was so secure, I didn't even remember my own login details for the account. I decided to cut my loses and leave it permanently banished.
What gets me is. I used the same computer to play the EU account as I did the US account. I was playing my US account at the time my EU account got compromised. I still play my US account and it has not been compromised... yet.
What my thinking is leading to is. Who ever is compromising these accounts are targeting them systematically in a way that does not point to the fault of the user. Some thing went wrong during the Battle.net transition and its pointing to database leak of some sort, be it remotely/illegally accessed, social engineering used against Blizzard employee(s) or simply the employee(s) leaking it themselves. There have been too many inactive accounts being compromised and many of them being quite internet savvy people.
I'd like to hear the bullshit reason that this account was compromised due to not being careful. But until it happens to you and you were one of the ones doing what they are suppose to: that's when you'll understand that user stupidity isn't always the case.
TLDR; Played EU WOW july 2007- feb 2008. Left EU WOW account inactive for two years and forgot login details. Played US WOW jan 2009 - present on the same computer. EU account gets compromised while playing US account. US account is fine.
Me and My girlfriend have had are accounts sense December 2004. I have never been hacked and neither has she. We have went inactive for months at a time. I have never had one issue I have never even changed my password. We don't even have authintactors. If you get hacked its more then likely something you did.
Granted, there ARE cases of people being idiots (going to suspicious websites, clicking on suspicious email links, giving away their account info, getting a keylogger, etc.).
Ever since Battle.net came into force. This is becoming not the case. There have been rumors that a blizzard employee has gone rogue selling account information and that an internal fraud specialist was recently hired. Of course, what goes on in Blizzard is kept hush hush as they want to retain their flawless company image and always blame the user in any case of accounts being compromised.
This is not a new "rumor" since the battle.net changes took place. People have been blaming blizzard for their account getting hacked for years now. Just search this forum for plenty examples of that.
To go one step further, people in other games are blaming their respective companies for having some rogue employee selling their information.
Bottom line: end users are vulnerable and going up against pair professionals who are experts at deceiving players and getting their account details. Not understanding how it happens isn't a big surprise.
Why have so many players been hacked, it is microsofts fault there is a rather huge security hole that hackers are exploiting atm , microsoft knows about it but does not think that keyloggers are a threat to rush a patch out.
These keyloggers are being passed along through advertising at many websites including sites you think is safe such as newspaper,fashion,gaming,movies,tv and more even the best antivirus cannot protect you from getting infected because it is an OS exploit.
More information on how to protect yourself from this exploit, MS says you can protect yourself by turning off shortcut feature but there are programs you can download from sophos to do this for you.
I have had a number of customers show up that had their WoW account hacked and i found out this is how they got infected and fixed the vulnerability for them.
So unless you use your computer just for playing wow there is no way to be safe.
If you get hacked 99% of the time it is due to neglegence. People give out their personal details to family or friends or they click on links via e-mail or web pages without reading first.
I have been playing MMO's since they started and I have over 20+ game accounts spread out and never have i gotten hacked. I never give out my info to any one, that includes family. And if you are careless enough to click on all those spam blizzard e-mails, well you deserve to be hacked
If you get hacked 99% of the time it is due to neglegence. People give out their personal details to family or friends or they click on links via e-mail or web pages without reading first.
I have been playing MMO's since they started and I have over 20+ game accounts spread out and never have i gotten hacked. I never give out my info to any one, that includes family. And if you are careless enough to click on all those spam blizzard e-mails, well you deserve to be hacked
Neglegence isn't confined to that of the user.
There are people who are getting hacked that haven't played in months, even years. There are also people receiving phishing emails on their B.net linked email account that they use exclusively for B.net and nothing else. The former is suspcicious, the latter is impossible unless there is a security hole within Blizzard that is leaking user emails... which is entirely possible if Blizzard is selling user information to marketing companies.
Fans of Blizzard want to believe it just happens to be millions of idiots getting hacked in a short span of time, that sentence alone should make something click in your head. But if it didn't perhaps the huge increase in amount of accounts hacked since the forced switch to battlenet vs the significantly fewer hacks before the switch will cause your brain to make the connection.
Battletnet is an extremely insecure system, and forcing the username to be the person's e-mail just makes it that much easier for people to hack the account. This isn't just a case of tons of stupid WoW players, it is an issue with the program.
Fans of Blizzard want to believe it just happens to be millions of idiots getting hacked in a short span of time, that sentence alone should make something click in your head. But if it didn't perhaps the huge increase in amount of accounts hacked since the forced switch to battlenet vs the significantly fewer hacks before the switch will cause your brain to make the connection.
Battletnet is an extremely insecure system, and forcing the username to be the person's e-mail just makes it that much easier for people to hack the account. This isn't just a case of tons of stupid WoW players, it is an issue with the program.
I think it's a combionation of both. Alot of people in WoW are retarded, but onteh flip side i know a bunch of people who arent who were hacked. I myself have never been hacked, but I do realize there is more to it than just idiots. If they can't protect there own servers from gold sellers dropping bodies in mid air to spell out websites ... how good can the rest of their security be?
If you get hacked 99% of the time it is due to neglegence. People give out their personal details to family or friends or they click on links via e-mail or web pages without reading first.
I have been playing MMO's since they started and I have over 20+ game accounts spread out and never have i gotten hacked. I never give out my info to any one, that includes family. And if you are careless enough to click on all those spam blizzard e-mails, well you deserve to be hacked
Same here, never got hacked ever. I'm no computer security expert, i just use common sense and do not share my account info with anyone.
Its really very simple... WoW has the most players out of any MMORPG by far. As a result, there are far more people attempting to steal accounts for this game than there are for any other game. There are also more add-ons for WoW than any other game... which leads to people downloading things they might not always fully trust or understand. Some of these add-ons contain keyloggers which will send usernames/passwords to account thieves.
Account thieves also send out very professional-looking scam emails that trick WoW players into freely giving away their account information. Although Blizzard has said many times that they will NEVER ask for this info, players receive these emails and click on links that don't take them to Blizzard sites and then enter their account information. The fact is, there are so many people playing WoW that there are quite a large proportion of them who do not use common sense...
In 99.99999% of cases, the user is at fault for losing their account. They either downloaded something malicious or they freely gave away their account info to scammers. There are a lot of sharks out there... if you don't want to get 'hacked' as people say, try not to be stupid. Blizzard can take all the precautions in the world, but there is no cure for stupidity.
Everyday there seems to be someone complaining about getting hacked. I even know a guy in real-life that has been hacked. I'm assuming that it's because of the third party add-ons that are "required" to play, but is that the reason or is there something else?
Well, dunno if that has already been mentioned, but there exist quite some "drive-by"-exploits. One example are manipulated web sites. The web site may contain some small frames, which are so small, that they aren't displayed on the screen. But the frame contains some "encrypted" code that loads data from another destination which may load a program from somewhere else. The program will most likely exploit a weakness of the browser or the operating system and install some malware/keylogger. Similar things can happen when trying to open manipulated documents, sound files or videos. It will suffice to visit a faked or manipulated game guide / addon site.
A firewall and an up to date anti virus software may help protect you. But there is one big legacy issue with mostly windows users. It's not really the fault of the users, since most don't know better. But in the past most consumer software required you to work with administrator rights on your computer (even if that wasn't necessary). So blame goes partly even to the IT industry. Access control and multi user concepts were no topic for consumer computers, but more so for bigger companies. If you work with a user account with limited access rights then a good number of "drive-by"-exploits won't do much harm to the operating system. You will not be 100% secure of course. The drawback is that keeping your computer (operating system and software) up to date, as well as installing new software will be a little bit more tedious.
Another point is 3rd party web sites. You can't be sure if they are safe or not. It all depends on how the 3rd party is ensuring their service will be safe. Do they regularly check their servers? Do key patch the service in a timely manner? Do they check checksums of their web pages to detect manipulation? etc.
Another thing to keep in mind are phishing mails. They will look like "official mails" from a certain service provider. Sometimes it's easy to recognize the mails as fake, because of grammar and spelling errors. Sometimes they may be disguised better. But if you are not sure whether a mail mail is real or fake, then don't click on the links withing the mail. Especially if the mail requires you to give some details about your account (e.g. user name and password). Even if someone claims to be from the service staff or the administrator of some service and requests you to give out those informations (especially passwords), then remember one thing: DON'T ever give away your PASSWORD to anyone!
It's easy to forget a password, but any administrator can reset the password and assign a new temporary password. But a real administrator will never ask you for a password. Dunno, but does anyone have actual figures on how many people fall for this trick?
Another thing are weak passwords. I mean those really weak passwords like birthdates, names of relatives or pets. Sorry, but you shouldn't make things easier than necessary. Today it will suffice to go to your {insert random social networking site} and look up the names and try some combinations.
My WoW account got hacked a few months back and I still have no idea why. Was playing one day got booted off and couldnt get back on, couldn't even use the automated account recovery thing because they had changed my email address.
First thing I did was run 3 different virus/malware scanners , found nothing.
I received 0 phishing emails or any emails at all from blizzard prior to getting hacked.
I never used addons that use an exe.
I never install odd browser extensions/plugins. I keep flash up to date
when I called phone support I could not reach them as their phone lines had reached their maximum capacity. Had to use email support to get account back which took 5 days and still couldn't play as the 'hackers' added a mobile authenticator to the account. still couldn't contact phone support another round of emails took a few days to get the authenticator off.
Im more inclined to believe it was a problem on blizzards end as the 'hackers' changed my email address, and blizzard had gotten a mass amount of calls the same time my account got compromised. I realize its possible it was on my end so I did reformat my computer and made a new email address and all that, as well as ordered an authenticator.
Ended up canceling my account altogether when they reviled their 'RealID' plans as it shows they don't care about internet security, even after they changed their mind about the realid forums, I still don't trust them with my credit card info
My WoW account got hacked a few months back and I still have no idea why. Was playing one day got booted off and couldnt get back on, couldn't even use the automated account recovery thing because they had changed my email address.
First thing I did was run 3 different virus/malware scanners , found nothing.
Doesn't mean there was nothing there. New infections are released every day and many have not been seen yet by ANY security company. It also may have deleted itself once it mined the information it needed. Many password stealers will do this after running.
I received 0 phishing emails or any emails at all from blizzard prior to getting hacked.
I never used addons that use an exe.
Any program you download can potentially come bundled with online game password stealers. I work in the security software industry and I can tell you that they are one of the very most common threats.
I never install odd browser extensions/plugins. I keep flash up to date
Do you use Internet Explorer? If so, it might not matter which browser extensions or plugins you have. IE has more well-known security holes than any other browser and almost all exploits are designed for it. I would recommend using Chrome, Firefox or Safari instead.
when I called phone support I could not reach them as their phone lines had reached their maximum capacity. Had to use email support to get account back which took 5 days and still couldn't play as the 'hackers' added a mobile authenticator to the account. still couldn't contact phone support another round of emails took a few days to get the authenticator off.
This is only because Blizzard has so many customers to deal with and their support department may not be able to accomidate their customer base... especially when many of them need complicated account restorations.
Im more inclined to believe it was a problem on blizzards end as the 'hackers' changed my email address, and blizzard had gotten a mass amount of calls the same time my account got compromised. I realize its possible it was on my end so I did reformat my computer and made a new email address and all that, as well as ordered an authenticator.
It is EXTREMELY unlikely that the security breach was on Blizzard's end. First of all, they have industry-leading security measures in place to protect their servers. Only the most talented hackers would be able to penetrate their databases. Secondly, the account information stored on these servers is ENCRYPTED. Even if hackers were able to somehow gain access to the data, it would be incredibly difficult to decrypt and read it. Most people with these kinds of skills are busy hacking governments or corporations... they don't usually tend to care about video games.
Ended up canceling my account altogether when they reviled their 'RealID' plans as it shows they don't care about internet security, even after they changed their mind about the realid forums, I still don't trust them with my credit card info
That is your prerogative of course. You can believe whatever you want to believe if it makes you happy. But you are wrong about them breaching your information. I guarantee you it was something you did/did not do to make yourself vulnerable.
Comments
I'd prefer if you didn't get naked with me, thank you very much. The word is spelled bear like in the word bearable. The word bear can be either a noun or a verb. As a noun it can be a name or an animal as well as other things (I'm pretty sure in the show Doug there was a character that always had a bag of pastries with bear-claws in them).
As a verb, "bear" means to carry or to support. When I said "Bear with me" I'm literally asking for yall to support me with my thought. In this case I wanted people to explain why there are so many posts about people being hacked in WoW.
--------
"Chemistry: 'We do stuff in lab that would be a felony in your garage.'"
The most awesomest after school special T-shirt:
Front: UNO Chemistry Club
Back: /\OH --> Bad Decisions
LoL ok, well i gave my reasons why people are getting hacked. It is the data base addons like gatherer, gear score, and wow head. The ones that take information off of your computer or when you log in the game. They have it in their database.
I had my account compromised and closed by Blizzard on account of hackers.
I'd not played for almost a year prior to such happening (around the battle-net account switches), and I'm definitely (I promise) more internet savvy than the people who claim only the "unsavvy" are prone to being hacked (and the like). I've been playing MMO's since the Mythic days, and I've never had an account compromised in 10+ years of gaming. The fact is, it's a big game and because of that it attracts more than just gamers. While it's unfortunate that I lost my account and all of my characters, and that Blizzard has only managed to respond once or twice to my emails, i'm glad the account was closed for my security.
But yeah, anyone who thinks that the only people being hacked are scam-mail fondling idiots, is surely a tunnel vised and equally filthy wanker.
I am in a similar situation. I played for a couple years, quit and then started a new account recently and I am hacked within 2 weeks. I dont browse porn, DL addons, buy gold, or frequent unsavory sites and yet I am hacked. They deleted my character and made a bunch of characters on many different servers. I am trying to get it fixed but really asking my self if this game is worth all of the hassle with so little support from Blizzard.
My WoW account has been hacked. Never opened an email by or about Blizzard/WoW. Only look at emails I'm personally familiar with and check all links within emails before clicking them. Never purched gold or paid someone to level a character on my account. Am I still an idiot?
Don't they also get your info from hacking forums or other game sites and trying the same user/pass for a WoW account?
I think the main reason is probably some sort of a security issue with Battle.net. Outside of that, I believe another reason is because of the sheer amount of players who play WoW. The game simply attracts more hackers.
I've ran into the same problem in AION.
I recently got hacked in WoW too. Hadn't used the account for several months, either. Never give out my password, use any plat or powerlevel sights, nor visit adult sites. I have played EQ for 10+ years and never been hacked there. I am always up to date on anti-virus, firewall and anti-spyware software.
The one thing I will say is once I reported things to Blizzard and they investigated they did restore all the gear and money for my hacked characters. So I am happy about that. I still am a little unnerved about being hacked in the first place.
You got lucky. When I got hacked, I reported it. Got sent a reply that things have been taken care of and well.....still have a banned account.
It's because they have an anti virus/anti spyware program and rely on that to keep them safe.
It's because they have an authenticator and believe it will keep them safe, because the company that sold it to them said so.
It's because they believe every email relating to the game is kosher.
It's because their super secret password, "passw0rd", is so obscure, it can't possibly be guessed and connected to their email address that is only known by users of public forums.
Pick a reason. None of them matter anyway. If they want your account enough, they'll get it eventually.
It's similar to being chased by a hungry bear. You don't have to outrun the bear, just the person next to you. As long as there are easier accounts to "hack", you're probably going to be safe.
THIS ^^^
Granted, there ARE cases of people being idiots (going to suspicious websites, clicking on suspicious email links, giving away their account info, getting a keylogger, etc.).
Ever since Battle.net came into force. This is becoming not the case. There have been rumors that a blizzard employee has gone rogue selling account information and that an internal fraud specialist was recently hired. Of course, what goes on in Blizzard is kept hush hush as they want to retain their flawless company image and always blame the user in any case of accounts being compromised.
I current play US WOW. I started playing on this account Jan 2009. I'm a guild leader of two guilds on both Horde and Alliance at the server I play on. I've played MMOs for the past 10 years (never had an account compromised) and been using the Internet for the past 15 years. I also build computers for a living. So when I get some random whisper to say to goto a suspicious website or receive an email from "Blizzard", you bet I am cautious every time and very wary of the latest scams (not to mention laughing at the obvious ones).
Late last year, my EU account - that I created in 2007 and retired at the beginning of 2008 - was compromised. I had friends from EU making a trial account on US to come contact me about it. The account had been inactive for almost two years and was NOT signed up to Battle.net. Needless to say once the "hacker" got a hold of the account, they quickly added it to their battle.net account, clean out the account and went on a superman hack mining spree until banished.
Now this account was so secure, I didn't even remember my own login details for the account. I decided to cut my loses and leave it permanently banished.
What gets me is. I used the same computer to play the EU account as I did the US account. I was playing my US account at the time my EU account got compromised. I still play my US account and it has not been compromised... yet.
What my thinking is leading to is. Who ever is compromising these accounts are targeting them systematically in a way that does not point to the fault of the user. Some thing went wrong during the Battle.net transition and its pointing to database leak of some sort, be it remotely/illegally accessed, social engineering used against Blizzard employee(s) or simply the employee(s) leaking it themselves. There have been too many inactive accounts being compromised and many of them being quite internet savvy people.
I'd like to hear the bullshit reason that this account was compromised due to not being careful. But until it happens to you and you were one of the ones doing what they are suppose to: that's when you'll understand that user stupidity isn't always the case.
TLDR; Played EU WOW july 2007- feb 2008. Left EU WOW account inactive for two years and forgot login details. Played US WOW jan 2009 - present on the same computer. EU account gets compromised while playing US account. US account is fine.
-Azure Prower
http://www.youtube.com/AzurePrower
Me and My girlfriend have had are accounts sense December 2004. I have never been hacked and neither has she. We have went inactive for months at a time. I have never had one issue I have never even changed my password. We don't even have authintactors. If you get hacked its more then likely something you did.
This is not a new "rumor" since the battle.net changes took place. People have been blaming blizzard for their account getting hacked for years now. Just search this forum for plenty examples of that.
To go one step further, people in other games are blaming their respective companies for having some rogue employee selling their information.
Bottom line: end users are vulnerable and going up against pair professionals who are experts at deceiving players and getting their account details. Not understanding how it happens isn't a big surprise.
Why have so many players been hacked, it is microsofts fault there is a rather huge security hole that hackers are exploiting atm , microsoft knows about it but does not think that keyloggers are a threat to rush a patch out.
These keyloggers are being passed along through advertising at many websites including sites you think is safe such as newspaper,fashion,gaming,movies,tv and more even the best antivirus cannot protect you from getting infected because it is an OS exploit.
More information on how to protect yourself from this exploit, MS says you can protect yourself by turning off shortcut feature but there are programs you can download from sophos to do this for you.
http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2010/07/26/shortcut-exploit-free-tool/
I have had a number of customers show up that had their WoW account hacked and i found out this is how they got infected and fixed the vulnerability for them.
So unless you use your computer just for playing wow there is no way to be safe.
If you get hacked 99% of the time it is due to neglegence. People give out their personal details to family or friends or they click on links via e-mail or web pages without reading first.
I have been playing MMO's since they started and I have over 20+ game accounts spread out and never have i gotten hacked. I never give out my info to any one, that includes family. And if you are careless enough to click on all those spam blizzard e-mails, well you deserve to be hacked
Neglegence isn't confined to that of the user.
There are people who are getting hacked that haven't played in months, even years. There are also people receiving phishing emails on their B.net linked email account that they use exclusively for B.net and nothing else. The former is suspcicious, the latter is impossible unless there is a security hole within Blizzard that is leaking user emails... which is entirely possible if Blizzard is selling user information to marketing companies.
Fans of Blizzard want to believe it just happens to be millions of idiots getting hacked in a short span of time, that sentence alone should make something click in your head. But if it didn't perhaps the huge increase in amount of accounts hacked since the forced switch to battlenet vs the significantly fewer hacks before the switch will cause your brain to make the connection.
Battletnet is an extremely insecure system, and forcing the username to be the person's e-mail just makes it that much easier for people to hack the account. This isn't just a case of tons of stupid WoW players, it is an issue with the program.
I think it's a combionation of both. Alot of people in WoW are retarded, but onteh flip side i know a bunch of people who arent who were hacked. I myself have never been hacked, but I do realize there is more to it than just idiots. If they can't protect there own servers from gold sellers dropping bodies in mid air to spell out websites ... how good can the rest of their security be?
Same here, never got hacked ever. I'm no computer security expert, i just use common sense and do not share my account info with anyone.
Its really very simple... WoW has the most players out of any MMORPG by far. As a result, there are far more people attempting to steal accounts for this game than there are for any other game. There are also more add-ons for WoW than any other game... which leads to people downloading things they might not always fully trust or understand. Some of these add-ons contain keyloggers which will send usernames/passwords to account thieves.
Account thieves also send out very professional-looking scam emails that trick WoW players into freely giving away their account information. Although Blizzard has said many times that they will NEVER ask for this info, players receive these emails and click on links that don't take them to Blizzard sites and then enter their account information. The fact is, there are so many people playing WoW that there are quite a large proportion of them who do not use common sense...
In 99.99999% of cases, the user is at fault for losing their account. They either downloaded something malicious or they freely gave away their account info to scammers. There are a lot of sharks out there... if you don't want to get 'hacked' as people say, try not to be stupid. Blizzard can take all the precautions in the world, but there is no cure for stupidity.
I don't even play wow and yet for the past 6 months or so , i been getting wow spams in my email like everyday.... and not just wow , aion also....
The fourth reason is that it is cost effective for these companies to aggressively target WoW above all other games.
"The liberties and resulting economic prosperity that YOU take for granted were granted by those "dead guys"
Well, dunno if that has already been mentioned, but there exist quite some "drive-by"-exploits. One example are manipulated web sites. The web site may contain some small frames, which are so small, that they aren't displayed on the screen. But the frame contains some "encrypted" code that loads data from another destination which may load a program from somewhere else. The program will most likely exploit a weakness of the browser or the operating system and install some malware/keylogger. Similar things can happen when trying to open manipulated documents, sound files or videos. It will suffice to visit a faked or manipulated game guide / addon site.
A firewall and an up to date anti virus software may help protect you. But there is one big legacy issue with mostly windows users. It's not really the fault of the users, since most don't know better. But in the past most consumer software required you to work with administrator rights on your computer (even if that wasn't necessary). So blame goes partly even to the IT industry. Access control and multi user concepts were no topic for consumer computers, but more so for bigger companies. If you work with a user account with limited access rights then a good number of "drive-by"-exploits won't do much harm to the operating system. You will not be 100% secure of course. The drawback is that keeping your computer (operating system and software) up to date, as well as installing new software will be a little bit more tedious.
Another point is 3rd party web sites. You can't be sure if they are safe or not. It all depends on how the 3rd party is ensuring their service will be safe. Do they regularly check their servers? Do key patch the service in a timely manner? Do they check checksums of their web pages to detect manipulation? etc.
Another thing to keep in mind are phishing mails. They will look like "official mails" from a certain service provider. Sometimes it's easy to recognize the mails as fake, because of grammar and spelling errors. Sometimes they may be disguised better. But if you are not sure whether a mail mail is real or fake, then don't click on the links withing the mail. Especially if the mail requires you to give some details about your account (e.g. user name and password). Even if someone claims to be from the service staff or the administrator of some service and requests you to give out those informations (especially passwords), then remember one thing: DON'T ever give away your PASSWORD to anyone!
It's easy to forget a password, but any administrator can reset the password and assign a new temporary password. But a real administrator will never ask you for a password. Dunno, but does anyone have actual figures on how many people fall for this trick?
Another thing are weak passwords. I mean those really weak passwords like birthdates, names of relatives or pets. Sorry, but you shouldn't make things easier than necessary. Today it will suffice to go to your {insert random social networking site} and look up the names and try some combinations.
My WoW account got hacked a few months back and I still have no idea why. Was playing one day got booted off and couldnt get back on, couldn't even use the automated account recovery thing because they had changed my email address.
First thing I did was run 3 different virus/malware scanners , found nothing.
I received 0 phishing emails or any emails at all from blizzard prior to getting hacked.
I never used addons that use an exe.
I never install odd browser extensions/plugins. I keep flash up to date
when I called phone support I could not reach them as their phone lines had reached their maximum capacity. Had to use email support to get account back which took 5 days and still couldn't play as the 'hackers' added a mobile authenticator to the account. still couldn't contact phone support another round of emails took a few days to get the authenticator off.
Im more inclined to believe it was a problem on blizzards end as the 'hackers' changed my email address, and blizzard had gotten a mass amount of calls the same time my account got compromised. I realize its possible it was on my end so I did reformat my computer and made a new email address and all that, as well as ordered an authenticator.
Ended up canceling my account altogether when they reviled their 'RealID' plans as it shows they don't care about internet security, even after they changed their mind about the realid forums, I still don't trust them with my credit card info