Hacked!

SCARY...

Well, I'm glad to hear they are making some progress. I hope you can get ride of that trojan and get back into the swing of things.

 

I have an authenticator. It was a bit of a pain for the first couple weeks but now its second nature. I also taped the authenticator serial number under my desk just in case I loose it (that's the info blizz needs to remove the authenticator from your account). Also, when I install from curse I always use the manual install thingy.

 

When you get back and if you need any help getting back on your feet let me know what I can do. I'm kinda poor atm but i can farm like no tomorrow

Oh, this is another reason not to buy gold. It just supports these a-holes and makes the gold buyer and equally big a-hole.

Exactly Ajax.

 

Has anyone seen a "Chinese gold farmer" actually farming gold in Northrend? Seems like they have found that simply stealing it takes a lot less time. (Hence the discounted rates, I suppose.)

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Thanks so much to everyone who has volunteered to "take up a collection" or contribute to help me out! I profoundly hope that a full restore will be possible though. (Even if GMs were feeling helpful about restoring all my individual bits of gear - Man, that would take a long time!) Fingers crossed!

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Authenticators still unavailable. I wonder what they are going for from scalpers on eBay?

(checked - the ones closing tonight were going for $25-38)

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Latest scan seems clean of the keyloggers though! Going through the process I've learned a lot about keyloggers and the even more malicious "rootkits" though. Worth a read of the info about those in Wikipedia, if you have any interest in IT (or even securing your own PC)!

Edited March 4, 2009 by Fatherpeteus

Solution: be poor. If your account is stolen you aren't really out anything XD

Gold imo is nothing it's the gears that matter. Going through re-gearing totally is very long and brings you back to doing things that you have done a zillion times to get that item.

When I was hacked, my gold/gear was gone and one of my toons was deleted. Asked Blizz to do a 1-time Full account restore to the hour before it was hacked. Boom, everything was back. Try to sweet talk to Blizz phonemonkey into giving you one. You can only do 1 of those restores for the life of your account, so if too many things is out of whack, go for it.

Hey Powerstripe - Who did you need to talk to to get your account restored? In-game GM, email to the Account Admin people, or... ?

Hey Powerstripe - Who did you need to talk to to get your account restored? In-game GM, email to the Account Admin people, or... ?

 

It was the in-game gm that actually informed be that it was one-time and performed it. Someone on the phone told be about it initially. Took 3 hours to transfer my toon back from Warsong, and about a week to get all my gear back.

Authenticators still unavailable. I wonder what they are going for from scalpers on eBay?

(checked - the ones closing tonight were going for $25-38)

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THis is really stupid. Why don't Blizz put a sufficient amount of those available.

 

Didn't anticipate demand, I suppose.

 

Somewhere in China, an electronics manufacturer is probably getting a big order for a couple million more authenticator tokens. Ironically (?), given the whole "Chinese farmer" thing being the origin of the problem.

I have called Blizzard customer service and they say they receive a new shipment each Monday or Tuesday. So you have to check on both those days early to get one of those.

I has update!

 

So yesterday I got word that my characters were back on Skullcrusher. Payed my subscription back up, and looked over the damage. Oddly enough, I don't think I lost any (or much) gold - I guess Blizz caught their hacks and banned the account before they got around to transferring what they went to all that trouble for. So basically, they spent hours going through my bags, mail slots and banks (I'm a packrat!), vendored most stuff they could (my DK still had almost all his stuff, because the DK zone quest gear can't be vendored, but my rogue and hunter had pretty much nothing left but badge gear.)... And then ended up with pretty much nothing, for all their "work".

 

In another spot of luck, my two geared 80s (Father and Bright) still had almost all of their (mainspec) gear still. I suppose the hacker was intending to either sell them, or use them to farm? Hard to say what they were thinking really - Father had all his healing gear except his T7 pants and trinkets (?) and Bright had all his tanking gear except his sword and boots (??) Barefoot pugilist tanking ftw!

In another odd bit of the bad guys getting caught before they could finish raping my account, Bright still had two pairs of BoE boots from Naxx25 in his bags, for DPS and healing - Not sure about the DPS ones, but the healy boots are best in slot and sell for ~2500g. Still, they won't do me much good for tanking!

 

So, I was off to work on getting my gear back. The Outfitter addon tells me what I'm missing, as it keeps track of the gear I had set up to use for my tanking set, dps set, etc. No way in heck would I have been able to remember every piece I had collected, even for my tankadin/gear collector, not to mention my other seven toons.

So I filled a page with all of the missing gear for my various toons, and fired a GM ticket off (should have sent the ticket first, but no biggie.) A GM actually got back to me quite quickly (~45m), and told me how it works. He sent a request off to a specialist, who (in a couple of days) will review my current gear vs what I had last Thursday night, and mail me the missing stuff. Sounds like I may actually come out ahead (kindof) since I still have the shards from stuff they DEd with Father. I've lost a lot of semi-valuable stuff like stacks of food and green gems, but that's not a big deal.

I wasn't sure if I would lose stuff I happened to gain between now and the restore (i.e. would my toons get rolled back), but apparently no, all they are going to do is some kind of comparison, then mail me everything I had then and don't have now. (Hopefully with gems and enchants intact, we'll see!) So after talking to the GM and mailing some misc stuff back to the toon it belonged with, I took my L58 DK and his intact quest gear to Outland and ground out a couple of levels, then went to bed.

 

I expect I can find a passable tanking sword and boots for Bright (rep?) and get him back in the swing in time to tank for late-night Naxx tonight, so things are definitely heading in the right direction! Also, I am fairly confident I have the keylogger off my PC now... And I hope to be able to order an authenticator next week. Nothing like being robbed to motivate a person to step up the security, in life or in WoW!

 

Thanks again to everyone who has been offering to help - It looks like I'm going to be OK after all! I may be up for a boot-farming heroic run this afternoon or something though!

Edited March 5, 2009 by Fatherpeteus

Glad to hear you are good to go Father. I think there are some boots from the Ebon blade doods, blue, but still. Maybe the AH will have a cheap pair of Inexorable Sabatons, if so, let me know and Ill chip in, I bought mine for 1500g, but I've seen them for 900g before.

 

As for your priest... I don't know what kind of tanking gear would be good for him, you may want to ask Paigow since he does alot of tanking during instances.

As for your priest... I don't know what kind of tanking gear would be good for him, you may want to ask Paigow since he does alot of tanking during instances.

 

His Priest shadow? Feel free to message me if you have any questions. :3

 

AIM: Kevvyfbaby

MSN: Black-Bandana@hotmail.com

 

I also have FP's vent info so I'll jump on if you need me.

well that was an interesting and informative read, while being a horrible nightmare at the same time... im glad you are getting things back in order mr. petus.

 

I'm going to be spamming the blizz store for an authenticator as well. like someone else said, it would be a good investment given the time and money I have spent on the game itself.

 

TBH i bought gold from some random website at one point. like nothing 500g cuz i just didnt have the time to farm. i go to pick it up, and its a lvl 70 character (pre wotlk) in crown. i cant remember the name. but im thinking, wow this is odd.. it's not the typical lvl1 gold farmer named: "aasderftg" in no guild standing in IF.

 

so i get the gold on my 2nd account. (yes i am a 2 account having crackhead) and i immediately trade it to a character on my 1st account. wow gold laundering FTW. lol

 

next day i get an email from blizz saying i received items from a compromised account, and because i no longer had the gold they were going to delete my riding skills to make up for the gold i received. which they never did. they only took 30 gold off the character.

 

either way, when you buy gold these days, you can almost rest assured it is stolen or hacked gold unfortunately

So great news (if you didn't already hear me spamming guild chat with my happy babblings yesterday) - Bliz has completed a very thorough item restore for me! I was greeted yesterday by ~1000 items/stacks of items in the mail of all my various toons, and afik everything is back!

*Hugs Bright's sword and Father's trinkets*

 

So I'm fully back in business and looking forward to moar raiding - Thanks again to everyone who offered their support and kind thoughts during this "time of loss"!