Bot Vengeance?

[Anias]

Bots infected with trojan.

Yesterday 18 December Bots developer H* announced that their build server was infected with a trojan keylogger. H* also mentioned that this trojan was specifically designed to attack Diablobot* and WoWBot*, but it infected some different builds as well.


The products that were infected with this trojan were:
- 1 release of A*
- 1 release of GW2Bot*
- WoWBot* release of last week
- DiabloBot* release of last week


All users of Bot* products are advised to scan their computer with Microsoft Security Essentials, which detects and destroys the trojan. Reset your World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 and/or Guild Wars 2 passwords as well, just to be safe.

*Names changed so that people will not go download the bots.

So what do you guys think? Was it Blizzard? Or someone who was tired of the "we are working on the problem" answer? Or something else?

[Deleted]

Simply someone who wishes to use a bot users' vulnerability to banning in order to cover their tracks, put simply it's a good cover. People who use bots will be reluctant to report suspicious activity and have no one but themselves to blame when they get banned, much to the pleasure of keyloggers who can take advantage of already suspicious activity to create a guise for their own.

Edit: It's also worth noting that powerlevelling sites all keep documents of account details of every purchase, I've seen some of the documents myself and they contain full names, e-mails, passwords, realms, games, EU/US and so on, gold selling sites do the same, but without the passwords. Obviously they use this information to log into the account or transfer the agreed gold, but they don't delete the documents. Anyone exploiting their vulnerabilities can acquire these spreadsheets and has a wealth of information on every single purchase this company has ever had, including multiple purchases from the same people, in which you can cross reference details and password patterns. It's not usually the actual gold/powerlevel sites that do the real damage, it's people who aren't affiliated acquiring the spreadsheets and then using the data for their personal use.

Second edit: The keylogger thing is basically like getting ripped off on a drug deal, they're not going to call the police.

[traen]

People should care a little bit more about their security.
If you use a bot software you should be sure that it can't go past your PC's firewall.
None of your software that is not intended to connect to internet should be able to do that.

A trojan software that has no access to the internet is useless and harmless. Especially when you use virtualization software to run it in completely independent environment.

[Deleted]

Bots are generally unsafe, using them would risk both your account and your pcs security. Even if botting is an easier way to reach your, let's say, targets, feeling would never be the same with the one when you pay some effort, that feeling when you see your bags filled with gems, potions, enchats and gold, all worked by you.

*the following messsage might or might not be true, it depends on the person reading it. I'm a retired botter (a few chars, 2 professions on each one, tons of gold made) which never got banned or warned.

[traen]

Bots are generally unsafe, using them would risk both your account and your pcs security. Even if botting is an easier way to reach your, let's say, targets, feeling would never be the same with the one when you pay some effort, that feeling when you see your bags filled with gems, potions, enchats and gold, all worked by you.

In some games the gameplay is so repetitive and not interesting that its either use bots or stop playing.
People don't like to stop playing without achieving curtain goals.
Its like when you played Diablo for few month, got totally tired from it. If you play d2, you can download a trainer and give yourself all the best items. You'll say "Oh, so that's what I was trying to achieve with my 5000 baal runs!". You'll do few more clears for fun and will stop playing.
In d3 you can't download the trainer. So you have to cheat somehow else. The result is the same - you'll see all the items you dreamed to get(well, you won't get all the best items anyway, its theoretically impossible), and you'll stop this pointless farming.

As of such game as wow, botting is pretty much useless. Its annoying for other players, but it can't give you anything truly valuable. Everything worth having - like gladiator title, top pve and pvp gear, rare raiding mounts, fame and the respect from your guild and other players - can't be achieved with botting.
That's the best way to fight botting - to create a gameplay interesting and so hard that it would make impossible for bots to do it.
While the gameplay is so primitive that even bots can rich curtain(if not all) goals, there will always be people who would prefer to use bots instead of wasting their own time for such primitive gameplay.

[Marooned]

No its definitely not Blizzard, guess some no-lifer coder got bored and did this