Recently several players had their accounts hacked. Accounts had over 100k in gold, with greens, golds, and mini pets, or close to getting mini pets. Players contacted anet to let them know. All players had followed all security protocols, different passwords, no downloads, etc. When trying to change anet passwords, they were denied. When requesting help they were ignored. After writing back to let them know this all pointed a clear picture, anet still ignored them.

Guess what? Anet knows! either their vaunted security was breached, or one of their employees is doing this, and they do not want a mass panic and large numbers of players leaving. Well we are, be warned if you stay, your account and hard work is not safe, and at any time can and probably will be hacked if you have anything of value. They would rather ignore the problem than admit failure, so they hope we will go away, which we are, but are warning you on they way out, before we leave. Change your passwords, maybe even daily, make it harder for them to hack you, move your stuff around, and spend you money, which is the primary driver, do not hoard cash as that is the trigger for the hack. Be warned, they know and will not do anything to help you when attacked.

I changed your headline, as I felt it was misleading. I didn't see any proof in your post that a member of the ArenaNet staff was hacking accounts. Don't speculate. Let's stick to the facts and get to the bottom of this.

If there is something fishy going on, a warning is good. I'm going to let this thread continue.

Has anyone seen any suspicious activity in Guild Wars? Who are these players that didn't get help from ArenaNet? In my relations with ArenaNet, they have been very sensitive towards security.

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Michael Garofalo
Webmaster - http://photics.com

I do not have any money anyway

Hmm, ok, no offense, but I'd like to know more about the people who got "hacked". Was the account really hacked or were the players just too stupid for their own good?

In order to get into my Guild Wars account you'd need to know the email I use for GW AND my password. Now, how would someone find out about those if... people had not used his keylogger which was hidden in one of those 3rd party programs (which are forbidden by the GW EULA anyway).

Anet ignored them? Well, then it's likely that they found some illegal activity connected with those accounts. As it is, if I use a third party program and it has a keylogger to retrieve my access data and Anet ignores my "hack" incident because of this, then I shouldn't be surprised, right? It's an EULA violation to use those after all.

Sorry, but I've heard these "I got hacked" claims once too often. Whenever someone was "hacked", he had either used one of those programs with integrated keylogger or had just told someone his data. That doesn't qualify as hacking, sorry.

And well, what's your source for this information anyway, Malak?

yea, how do you know, if Anet doesnt care or let people know they know??

Watch out... incoming flame war.

Most likely one of these things happened:

A keylogger was recently discovered coming from ui.worldofwar.net, so they could also play WoW (like I do), and the keylogger got their Guild Wars password/email as well.

They could have claimed to ArenaNet that they folloed the EULA, but actually had hacks and game cheats.

They could have thought they were hacked and really ArenaNet banned their account. Mistakenly or not.

Unlikely, but possible, that ArenaNet was really hacked. If it was however, one, changing passwords would be useless, even changing your email connected to your account would be useless. Many more people would be talking about this.


Even in the worst case, if ArenaNet didn't tell anyone then they would lose more people. A huge security breach and not telling anyone? That would lose far more customers then saying, "Please increase the security on your accounts, someone has hacked in to our systems." Yes, people would be annoyed, yes people would leave, but not as many.

Well, thats my view. I'll post if I think of anything else.

P.S. Try to avoid the coming flame war :P

I think the responses here have been fairly civil. That's something to be expected from Photics.com regulars. People are defending ArenaNet's integrity. I too find it hard to believe that ArenaNet would drop the ball on security. One of the strengths of Guild Wars is the network and the teamwork from the developers. (Man... their team work shows through in PvP too. Ugh, the Dev Team was tough!)

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Michael Garofalo
Webmaster - http://photics.com

No flame war, no worries.

I can only say, I've been playing after this "warning" and I haven't been hacked. As I said, one has to get my email and my PW to get into my GW account. And there isn't really any easy way of doing that, except for a keylogger hidden in a forbidden program. And if a hacker would really have the skill to find out my email and PW either from the Anet server or from my machine (though, it's not stored here), then why would he bother with it? If he has such skills he can do something more interesting than that. I don't think that a real hacker (someone with skills, not some "l33t" script kiddie) would waste time with something like this. And even if he succeeds, what's there to win? Nothing, no bank data, no insurance numbers, no credit card numbers... nothing.

I remember in Lineage 2, more than once people were bitching "I got hacked". Just later one would usually discover that they were just dumb and had used a third-party program, which had carried a keylogger. Whoops?

I have only had a site moderator hack my website but when I contact "support" I am always sent back to "Create account" screen even if logged in.
I have reported this and Arenanet's response was to e mail the same playNC support site that I have the problem with?
My guild has therefore been subjected to stalking for FOUR months and "the team" have taken NO notice of the reports made.
I also reported verbal abuse from my site hacker (She? even called ME a hacker on open chat.- screenshot sent to "The team" p.r)
Does presearing.com have immunity from bans for their members or what?
Edit- P.S My RSS site feed was sabotaged along with links so I now have a problem trying to post RSS news and Updates - any suggestions?

I'm confused. I don't understand what's going on.


Are you're saying that a site moderator hacked your website? That makes me think of two questions...

1. Was this a moderator for your own website?
2. What is your website address?

I'm not sure if you're writing about your Guild Wars account or your website. The original post of this thread was writing about hack attacks on Guild Wars accounts. Regardless, the advice was the same as before - don't jump to conclusions.

I'm not clear on the facts.

I've been playing Guild Wars for about four years, but I have very little experience with contacting Guild Wars customer support. There's a section on the Guild Wars website that has support links...

http://www.guildwars.com/support/

...but it leads to the PlayNC support site.

http://www.plaync.com/us/support/prod_48.html

It looks like Guild Wars support is managed through PlayNC. For other NCsoft games, I've contacted PlayNC support before. They seem pretty good at resolving basic problems. This doesn't appear to be a basic problem. From what you've written, it's not clear what's wrong.

Who is harrassing your guild? Any idea why your guild would be singled out?

What does presearing.com have to do with this? If someone from that community is causing a problem, maybe you should contact the person in charge of that website. Maybe the webmaster of that site can help you settle this problem. I'm not aware of any special immunity for Guild Wars fansite operators.

If anything, it feels like ArenaNet gives me a harder time. HA HA!

To be honest, if all else was equal, I might side with presearing.com. I don't know you, but I do know that it takes hard work to create and run a "Specialty" Fansite. I don't know their side of the story. This is your first post here. I become very suspicious when the first post is something other than "Hello!"

Did you do anything that would instigate this matter?

Although, I took a quick look at their forum. Their announcement is a bit concerning - "Admins and mods do NOT delete or remove accounts." Was this a rogue site moderator? Did you get into an arguement with a site moderator? Are you writing about a site moderator of your own website or a site moderator of presearing.com?

Well... hacking is a crime... but are you sure it's related to this incident?

In the original post, it was suggested that ArenaNet employees were breaking into accounts. That seemed unlikely to me. True, the ArenaNet staff is large and I don't know all of them, but that doesn't seem like the reasonable scenario to me. Working at ArenaNet is a dream job. Why mess that up?

There are evil computers out there that automatically look for vulnerabilities in your website and your personal computer. What happened to your website after it was hacked? Was it defaced with personal messages? Did it say something like, "That's what you get for messing with Presearing.com you n00b!" That would make me suspicious. But maybe the attack is unrelated if it said something like, "BUY VIAGRA!"

I don't know what you should do, but it seems like your site needs to be rebuilt and secured. You might want to learn about ways to track web traffic, block suspicious IP addresses and record any malicious activity.

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Michael Garofalo
Webmaster - http://photics.com