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

[Seldum]

Holy shit. Im gonna get me an authenticator... im not as far as you guys, but I don't want to risk 1 year of work because of some lamer hackers

Im very sorry to hear your story, but thanks for sharing!

[Hurricane]

Last night i was under "attack" aswell. I was loading wow and then wow actually warned me that it had found a trojan thing and informed me that i should not try to log in.

I had downloaded ventrlio mix from the first site you get when you search for ventrlio mix on google. And this ventrlio mix thingy was the one thing that brought in the trojan to my computer.

I installed AVG and it found troajner call ord.exe or something, also some other shiat.

They have not attacked my accounts yet, think i stopped it before it got far enough.

one tip from me, always use latest version of software and always download it from the softwares legit site.. cant believe how incredibly stupid i was when downloadin ventrilo mix.. never again!

[Seldum]

I have just ordered an authenticator and setup a battlenet account with an email which cannot be connected to my wow account names, new longer more difficult passwords and so on.

All inspired by your loss Again thanks for sharing.

[Otlecs]

I really don't understand why a hacker would delete characters.

It's sheer bloody-mindedness, and gives an interesting insight into the mindset of the people who do this. They're not just doing it for business reasons - they really are nasty bastards who want to hurt people.

I personally know somebody who had their account hacked and all of their toons were logged in falling to the ground from Dalaran. Naked, obviously.

I've also heard anecdotal evidence of people logging in to find themselves deep under water with a couple of seconds' breath left, and dying of fatigue because they've been logged out so far from land.

It's just the final twist of the virtual knife from the cowardly scum-sucking pieces of shit that do this sort fo thing because they can't get a real job.

Honestly, IF I would ever have considered buying gold in the past, there's no way I would EVER even give it a moment's consideration since I first starting hearing about account hacks a couple of years ago.

So, yeah, really bad luck there Zamok, and even more worrying when you don't know exactly how they got the information to move that fast.

I hope Blizz manage to restore everything for you, and I hope the sweat-shop-dwelling, yellow-bellied losers who did it burn in hell.

[Fef]

I had one of my accounts hacked some months ago. The job was done very "cleanly". All that could be sold or DE'ed had been, and one of my characters (level 80 hunter) was apparently used for illegal stuff (teleporting here and there, I could "track" him from another account). For the rest, everything was left intact.

I still don't know how they could not get all my five accounts, though. They had plenty of time, account names were (still are actually) almost identical, passwords were the same ...

Anyway, Blizzard did a great job at restoring everything, and it went fairly fast. In 3 days, i was up and running. So, message of hope to the OP : it will end good

[Oswyn]

It's been a couple years since I got my accounts hijacked. I now have the authenticator, but I'm still so paranoid that I don't use my gaming computer to log into any email or banking sites.

[Gadzooks]

It all depends on who steals the account. Most keyloggers are from China or Indonesia, it seems, while the e-mail phishers are US based players (and Canada, they think they're immune from prosecution).

I could see the US thieves deleting characters, because if you go to sites where they hang out, they're all 13-18 year old anti-social snots.

The Chinese thieves are efficient. It's just a job to them. They tend to keep the high level toons to run bots in Wintergrasp, but I could see them deleting characters because the established characters would be too noticable to guildies and friends?

Anyway, sorry to hear you got hacked. This is the number one reason I have not installed WoW on my Windows Bootcamp yet, because I need to sit down and work out the best security plan I can. I have the WoW Authenticator on my iPhone, too, but after the last round of screwups, I'm holding off on that too.

[Marious]

Never click on an email link unless you know for sure what its about, if you have even a spec of doubt, dont do it!!! That's how they get most people, I only look at emails from people I know and I do not click on anything in them! And they say I am paranoid, well I am but that's neither here nor there, stuff that happens to my fellow boxers makes it ok for me to be paranoid

[daviddoran]

My guess s ther they delete toons after stripping to mark which they have already been to, so they can move faster.

I was a young newb once and bought powerleveling, then got hacked, probably from the same people, so I learned my lesson. People who still buy gold at this point are just as guilty as the sellers and hackers. String em up I say!

[Ughmahedhurtz]

The *only* thing I can think of for deleting the characters is maybe, possibly they think they can get more business that way? I guess they think people are stupid enough to say "I got all my shit taken and my toons deleted because of some random asshole, I don't want to start all over, so I'll pay this power leveling company to level a new toon for me." *shrug* Never underestimate the lengths people will go to to be utterly and mindnumbingly stupid?

Unless it takes longer to get toons back from a full delete as opposed to just restoring gear? I don't know, never been through it. I guess they could think that if the Blizz GMs have to spend X amount of time restoring a deleted toon and replacing the gear/money whatever, they {the account thieves} have longer before Blizz tracks them and the stolen currency down? Though I was under the impression that restores of that magnitude ended up as pretty much just toon rollbacks instead of having to research and replace.

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.