Hacking in WoW

[Martyn 470]

So, guys, my girlfriend is currently writing a report for her degree which is based around keeping the online gaming community safe. I was wondering if anyone could give any stories surrounding this, have you been hacked? and what happened ( how were you hacked , did you find the source, how did you remove it etc), how was your solved? if at all, how did it make you feel?

She also would like to know, if you buy anything from the WoW store, is that classed as your own virtual property? or is it just "rented" from the company, similar to how you don't actually own your itunes music.

If you have any stories about other games and hacking, she'd also love to know about this as well.

She's posted this on the official forums, but I thought I would try and help her out a bit, and I know the mmo-champion community is quite helpful in these matters.

[Vetis]

I think the virtual items are just additions to the software rental you have sadly.

It seems hacking has increased since they changed the username from an actual username to the email address - these can be harvested etc.. much more easily than the usernames.

[Shuyin]

buying an item from the blizzard store gives you the right to use it ingame (in other worlds, you could get it by hacking and risk a ban or buy it and be allowed to use it).
it DOESN'T give you any possession over it, it becomes an item like any other in your account, which belongs to Bliz.

also, all the spam you recive in your email about your account being suspected or password changed is an attempt of hacking called "phishing". have fun collecting all the data you want from there XD

edit: while collecting data remember that visiting those sites may get you hacked youself XD

[Lefeng]

The virtual "property" that you purchase from the Blizzard store is part of the software package that you have already agreed you have no ownership of by virtue of the the Terms of Service. You aren't paying for the item itself (it exists only as electrons anyway, and you can't take it with you if you unsubscribe), you are paying for the service of delivery.

[zealo]

Been hacked once because i was retarded enough to use the same password for my account and another forum, logged in roughly 3 hours after i went out and discovered that all my character's where stripped from all items and all banks cleaned and roughly 16k gold sent away and character's being naked located at my hearthstone location instead of where i logged out. Opened a ticket and a GM locked my account roughly 5 minutes later and had a number of email's sent to me in Chinese from battle.net, seemed like they had changed the base language setting for my account. Ran a virus search with norton + malvare bytes, changed email + passwords and logged in and had items restored by mail + gold.

At first i was in panic, but calmed slightly once blizzard had locked my account so the guy could not access my account anymore after which i changed from hotmail to gmail, definitely learned some things about internet security that day, served as a wake-up call for me even though it was not a enjoyable experience.