Hacked!

My World of Warcraft account was hacked a few weeks ago. It’s not an experience I recommend.

I’ve always been pretty scrupulous about my account in the past. Although it’s true I hadn’t bought one of the authenticators—a little keychain device that supplies a unique code to accompany your login password that’s supposed to guarantee that the person who owns the account is the actual person signing in—nor downloaded the software authenticator for my phone. I wrongly assumed that because I never played the game on strangers’ computers, or took my laptop outside my home to play, that I’d be immune to people snitching my password.

I’d actually taken a break from the game for about a week, right before my account was hijacked. I hadn’t logged on for a solid eight days. Then I used Blizzard’s mobile armory application on my phone to sign out of a weekly raid—and that’s where I ran into trouble. I either used the application somewhere on the road using the cellular network, or else in a coffee shop where I’d been working. Bad move, either way. That night, at one in the morning, my email account received a notification that I’d requested a password change. At four in the morning, I got a notification that my account had been suspended for suspicious activity.

All it took was three hours for them to wreak total havoc with my accounts. My World of Warcraft characters are basically spread over two different servers, but all the wealth and time were concentrated on Perenolde. There the hacker managed to liquidate everything not only in eight different characters’ banks and inventories, but cleaned out the bank of my guild as well—or at least the tabs available to me. Most of my toons carried between four to seven thousand gold apiece; one of them had an artifact that regularly sells on the auction house for more than ten thousand gold.

When I finally was able to log in, every single one of my characters was naked. My action bars were screwed up—every single one of my toons had spells removed so that the hackers could substitute macros to make their liquidation go more quickly. My hunter’s pets had been released into the wild, never to be retrieved again. Every emblem and badge I’d earned through daily dungeons was gone. Some of my characters had been removed from my guild; three of them had been transferred onto other servers, and one to another account entirely.

All in the space of three hours. It was depressing.

I got it all back, of course. Blizzard after two weeks sent me via in-game mail all the items that had been taken from me, down to the last copper and badge (though my hunter never got his pets back). Moving those items back into my inventory took an hour or even more per character, though, and while I waited I found the Blizzard support crew incredibly unhelpful and in one case even rude. I’m still not completely cleaned up.

The only up side to the whole debacle is that in the end, I made in-game money off of it. The account got shut down while one of my characters, apparently chosen to be the liquidator, was posting all kinds of stuff in the auction house. His bags were stuffed with epic jewels, enchanting materials, cooking spices, and other salable stuff. After the ordeal I’d been through, I had no compunction whatsoever in auctioning it off and pocketing the three thousand gold I made. Additionally, a few of my characters cashed in some honor tokens to add some new accessories to their outfits, and my main druid cashed in the rest of the honor points to buy four mounts.

Small consolation, really, but I take what I can.

I have an authenticator now, by the way. I highly advocate it.