Miraculous hack

[avarcis]

Recently my wow account got hacked
Now I know that we get one of those threads every second day, but this one comes with a TWIST.
I haven't played wow for over 2 years. I got it uninstalled way back then. The password I had for wow was unique and I never used it for any other purpose.
The only reason I found out is because I got an email notification about a cancelled char transfer and my account getting locked due to suspicious activity (damn right it's suspicious).
I would like to ask the more tech savvy of you, how would that be possible? As I understand it, it can't be because of a keylogger ( I haven't typed that password in over 2 years a single time). Any help with helping me figure out how it happened?

[Sierra85]

Do you play any other games on battle.net? Starcraft 2.... Diablo 3? etc...

[Gimlix]

Your Character came to life, logged in himself, because he was tired of sitting there in the dust.
Your main peaked at your keyboard everytime you logged in.

No he is not after your account, he is after a new owner, so he is trying to get a account transfer because he is tired of sitting there!

Blizzard noticed in time and could stop your character!

You are lucky he didn't ran away, or else it could be fatal for your WoW account!

[avarcis]

Do you play any other games on battle.net? Starcraft 2.... Diablo 3? etc...

Yes to both, but that has also been long ago. The last time was when D3 was 2 weeks old

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Could simply be by guessing the password. A lot of hackers use random password generators that can generate a thousand or more passwords every minute and run them against lists of emails in their system. Could just be they finally found yours.

Bastards must have been really motivated to steal my gold The password has 12 symbols, numbers and letters and makes 0 sence.
Also, wouldn't blizzard have any sort of protection from that sort of thing?

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Your Character came to life, logged in himself, because he was tired of sitting there in the dust.
Your main peaked at your keyboard everytime you logged in.

I would have much rather he'd help me farm some primals when I needed them so much! What a slacker.

[Grimble]

When they made me tie WoW to a battlenet email address, I created a new email address that would never be used for any other purpose and was largely unguessable in itself.

[tyrindor]

It could still be a keylogger you had years ago. Some keyloggers give the hackers huge amounts of data and that hackers may not have shifted through it all until recently. This is the most likely answer.

Could simply be by guessing the password. A lot of hackers use random password generators that can generate a thousand or more passwords every minute and run them against lists of emails in their system. Could just be they finally found yours.

You can't brute force battle.net, your IP gets temporary banned after only a dozen or so login attempts, it would take.. well years... to brute force a single account and Blizzard would know far before that, locking the account in questions after a couple dozen failed attempts.

I mean unless his password was "password" they wouldn't brute force it before it was locked down.

[Marmot]

Bastards must have been really morivated to steal my gold The password has 12 symbols, numbers and letters and makes 0 sence.

I think the less sense it makes, the easier it would be to crack.

[Kwaidan]

Someone will hopefully correct me if I'm wrong, but: I think "keylogger" occasionally sell the password they steal. This means that your password can be in circulation for X amount of time before a hacker/buyer decides to use it. Again: this might not be the case here.

[Lefeng]

As I understand it, it can't be because of a keylogger ( I haven't typed that password in over 2 years a single time).

Your password could have been logged two years ago and not used until now. These "hacking" firms have backlogs of passwords a mile long.

[Abysal]

I would like to ask the more tech savvy of you, how would that be possible? As I understand it, it can't be because of a keylogger ( I haven't typed that password in over 2 years a single time). Any help with helping me figure out how it happened?

How do you know your password wasn't keylogged over 2 years ago? The number of people who are actually hacking WoW accounts is quite small. I'd imagine any 1 hacker probably has 1000s of accounts that they have some level of access to. It's just a matter of when they get around to using it. The smart hackers aren't going to use an account that's still active because there's a much higher chance of getting caught/stopped. If the person using the account is logging in on a regular basis they are going to notice pretty quickly if they've been hacked. If the person hasn't logged in in 2 years they will only notice if Blizzard catches the hacker on their own.

Also there was some thing about a year ago where Blizzard's internal network was hacked.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain...mation-stolen/

E-mail addresses and security questions were part of this hack as well as scrambled passwords. It's possible that your information was stolen way back then as well.

[avarcis]

Your password could have been logged two years ago and not used until now. These "hacking" firms have backlogs of passwords a mile long.

I suppose it makes sense. You guys are awesome, thanx for helping me figure it out

[Deleted]

Best password is: whywouldanyonetrytoguessthisstupidpasswordtobeginwith? :P

[PixelFox]

The password I had for wow was unique and I never used it for any other purpose.

Well, for most people this would be an incorrect statement and likely the source of their trouble, but only you can know whether it's true or not in your case.

Remember that it could either be your WoW password or the password for the associated email account that could have been compromised and used to recover access to the WoW account.

Here's the additional case that most people don't consider: Could you have ever accidentally typed your WoW (or email) password when logging into something else? Another web site for example? Of course if you did you'd probably not think anything of it other than maybe "duh!" and proceed to then type the correct password and never think about it again.

But some compromised (or evil) sites will log all *failed* login attempts, because a lot of the time when someone types an incorrect password it's not that it was a typo but that they accidentally typed a different password than the one they wanted. If the site is already compromised/evil, the bad guys probably have your email address and/or username and those combined with the mystery password you typed have an excellent chance of getting them into something like your email, WoW, bank accounts, etc.

So if you ever accidentally type your WoW or email (or any other valuable) password accidentally into some other site or game, you should stop and consider whether you trust that site to not be logging and reselling that data, and if there's any question you should go and change the misused password immediately.

PF.

[chazus]

Miraculous? Hardly. Accounts people haven't logged into in a long time are prime property. It usually means they may not have an authenticator as well, and may not even notice that they got 'hacked'. And chances are, you didn't get 'hacked'. It's more likely they just got aggregate info to log in, as they most often do.

Your password complexity usually means nothing, especially if you don't log in after some time.

[Bluesftw]

just claim it back and enjoy free gametime , gift from hacker^^

[schicklgruber]

Recently my wow account got hacked
Now I know that we get one of those threads every second day, but this one comes with a TWIST.
I haven't played wow for over 2 years. I got it uninstalled way back then. The password I had for wow was unique and I never used it for any other purpose.
The only reason I found out is because I got an email notification about a cancelled char transfer and my account getting locked due to suspicious activity (damn right it's suspicious).
I would like to ask the more tech savvy of you, how would that be possible? As I understand it, it can't be because of a keylogger ( I haven't typed that password in over 2 years a single time). Any help with helping me figure out how it happened?

a blizz employee was selling wow account info (personal and wow account specific) a few years ago in wotlk right before authenticators came out. it could have come from that or 10000000 other ways

[markdall]

The only reason I found out is because I got an email notification about a cancelled char transfer and my account getting locked due to suspicious activity (damn right it's suspicious).

How certain are you that the email is legit? I get emails like this every day - they're phishing scams. If the email warned you about all this and then said something along the lines of, "In order to fix this, go here and login and fix it" then it's almost certainly a phishing scam.

[Deleted]

Hackers sell hacked accounts to people that are old and have been inactive for enough time to qualify for scroll of resurrection. People will buy an inactive account, attach it to their own battle.net (which changes the account owners name) then activate scroll of resurrection, and get an instant level 80. People will then either transfer the new level 80 to their own accounts or use the hacked account to bot.

You were key logged a long time ago, the hacker has been sitting on your account information long enough to first make it eligible for scroll of Resurrection and secondly find a buyer for you account information.

[MoanaLisa]

Old accounts that are inactive are the ones that seem to get hacked most often. Whether it's because of an old keylogger or simply a lot more time to parse through password attempts it's not that unusual.

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned much is this: if you care at all about your battle.net account you should get an authenticator on it. I can't really tell from your post whether you really care that much or not except that you went to the trouble to make the thread so I would assume you do.

[Lovestar]

A long time ago, I didn't run any security software or scripting protection or anything on my system, reasoning that I was a careful browser and didn't download shemale-conjoined-twin-goat-porn torrents, so I didn't need any protection. One bad Google click while shopping for a hardware upgrade got me malware'd anyway. By the time I realized something was seriously wrong with my computer, I had been logging in to my WoW account for 3-4 days.

So I flattened my hard drive to square one with a full reformat and cleansed anything that had been connected to my computer, and started taking online security more seriously. All good: computer has been squeaky-clean ever since. But did I change my passwords? No, of course not. It didn't even occur to me they'd be after my online gaming stuff.

About 18 months after that malware incident, my graphics card imploded, took my PCIe slot with it, through that took portions of my motherboard, and basically fried my computer to a well-done finish. I had no computer for about 2 weeks and when I did get it back online it was a clunky, limping shadow of its former self stuck with a PCI (not e, just... PCI) graphics card. Game over (literally).

I finally get WoW up and running (just barely) to check my characters and prevent auction mailings being deleted, etc. And my Hunter is mysteriously not where I last left her... and she's mysteriously standing at the bank in Darnassus. How odd! Oh well. Maybe I forgot where I logged out. So I trot back to the auctioneers and... my connection drops and I'm logged out. Hmmm. Try to log back in, and my password has already been changed. Oh boy.

So, 18 months after being malware'd for 4 days, I logged in to WoW after a 1-month "vacation" of hardware issues just as a hacker finally got around to invading the stolen account information. That should give you an idea of how long they can sit on this info. :p