Account Compromises
The "hacking" ("compromising" is probably a better word, since no real "hacking" is going on) being seen in D3 is no different than what World of Warcraft players have been seeing for five years or so. The sad thing is, if no one bought game currency (gold, credits, whatever) from these third-party companies, then essentially no account compromises would be occurring. Compromises not done by gold selling companies are very rare indeed. They strip one player to sell to another, because it's much more efficient than "farming" gold. They still farm some of course, but they do it purely with compromised accounts.
Unfortunately, these compromisers make a lot of money off of the practice (because players buy gold) and so they have a lot of resources to use to try to get your password from you directly, or through your computer. Some of their poorly translated phishing e-mails may be laughable, but their trojans, infected websites, etc. are not funny at all.
If you have the physical or mobile authenticator (both of which major banks use and charge $30+ for) the chances of you being compromised are very, very small. I've personally examined the MSInfo files of nearly all of the handful of WoW players who have actually been compromised through an authenticator, and the sheer number of backdoor programs and other malware on their systems has been mind boggling. Probably not coincidentally, these same people were also running a disturbing number of file-sharing and download programs, including ones which are commonly known to not be safe.
Again, compromising game accounts is a big business in some countries. They have people on their payroll who spread false rumors of "hacked through my authenticator" just to try to discourage people from using them. We charge $6.50 for the physical authenticator, because that's exactly what it costs us to make them. The mobile one is free because we don't have to pay a factory to build them. Use them, and enjoy your gaming without someone mucking with your stuff.
What is the concrete cause of the hackings?
Well, the cause is people desiring a shortcut in their games by buying gold. If you mean the technical cause, as I mentioned previously the gold selling companies use a vast array of methods. A good friend of mine is a long time network admin (and a very good one at that), who had decided to not use an authenticator because he'd never had any security issues with his computer over the years. Well, an Adobe Flash vulnerability popped up a couple years ago, and he procrastinated applying the update by a whole week. As you can probably guess by the fact that I'm relating this anecdote, his WoW account was compromised and stripped because of that one week window.
There's absolutely nothing shameful about getting compromised, these companies are good at what they do. Heck, the former head of Blizzard Customer Service had his account compromised. It's because of how devious and high-tech the gold-selling companies have gotten that we implemented the physical and mobile authenticators. We can't physically go to everyone's computer and make it safe, so we've provided a tool that does it for you.
I've been a computer tech for a long time, and I've never had a single malicious security breach on any of my computers that I'm aware of, but I attached one of the very first batches of physical authenticators to my account. Why? Because no matter how good I am, sooner or later they were going to get me. But now, they can't.
Are you claiming that I did not have both the dial in auth and the SMS auth?
No, you had those. But neither of those are the physical or mobile authenticator, the main line of protection that is being referred to. The Dial-In and SMS are just nice additional layers of security to add to the physical or mobile.
It's becoming pretty apparent that our naming scheme might be causing some confusion, and I apologize for that. I'll bring the subject up with my management, so can we review both how the devices are named and how they are presented. If you have only one authenticator on your account, you want it to be the physical or mobile, not the dial-in or SMS. (
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Auction House
Is this intended (To gear up solely through the AH) or will the drops at the end of Hell be better adjusted to help gear up for Inferno Act 1 and so on.
The auction house obviously provides an incredible service to allow for very easy trades between characters, and essentially blows out the wide range of items you could have available to you at any one time. So, in fact, the AH has to be a factor in how we drop items. On one hand you have a huge benefit because you can buy and sell items very easily, as opposed to having to post up WTS threads in the old USEast trading forums, but on the other end it does impact the item pool economy with the inherent ease at which you can trade items. If the AH existed but wasn't a factor at all into how items dropped/rolled, the economy would be completely tanked within a matter of weeks. (
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