spam ArenaNet emails

[Deleted]

Got these in my inbox today. Impressive seeing as i don't even have an account with them and have no intention of buying the game.






i personally don't think these are legit tbh but thought id pass them on incase others have issues who actually have the game

[Polarthief]

Got these in my inbox today. Impressive seeing as i don't even have an account with them and have no intention of buying the game.
i personally don't think these are legit tbh but thought id pass them on incase others have issues who actually have the game

I actually got two of the password ones, thinking someone requested a password change on mine (which is funny because you can change your PW on their actual website).

Thanks for ensuring me it was a fake!

[Deleted]

Same thing with me. Got an email change from them and I don't even have the game.

[Lane]

I received those same notices about an e-mail change. I also do not have a GW1/GW2 account, but I did sign up for their newsletter months ago. Just to make sure, I tried logging into their website with my e-mail and it says it does not belong to an account. Weird though. :P

[Lolsteak]

I got them emails about 6 hours ago aswell

[Flatspriest]

I got both of those emails as well, and the links actually do go where they say they go when you hover your mouse over them. They are phshing attempts though even though whoever sent the sucks at his job.

[Deleted]

i got 2 password reset emails :\

[Sarix]

clearly some asian really wants to use our emails to make accounts

[Deleted]

I got one of those e-mails.. Only I actually do have a GW2 account, and I can no longer login. (It tells me there is no account with that e-mail address.)

Interesting though that others are getting the same notifications, despite not having an account in the first place.

[Deleted]

Got the exact same a couple of hours ago, I also have no GW account

[Smygulf]

Gotten the same mails also :/ 3 of them...and i cant login since 3 days because my email adress didnt exist

[Deleted]

Rofl that you make a thread about this i'm allready getting mails like this for 4+ years for different games , pretty much plishing mails so dont click on the link...

[paralleluniverse]

I got the same emails and I don't have an ANet account and never have had one.

I thought it was a phishing attempt, but upon looking at the source, they are legit.

So how the hell did ANet get my email?

[Matchu]

I got the same emails and I don't have an ANet account and never have had one.

I thought it was a phishing attempt, but upon looking at the source, they are legit.

So how the hell did ANet get my email?

I posted this on Reddit before:

When you change your email, you receive an email with something like:

.com/verify?userid=VVVVVVVV-WWWW-XXXX-YYYY-ZZZZZZZZZZZZ&sessid=somethingrandom

No matter what I change my username email to, the XX,YY,ZZ portion stays the same. No matter how obscure I make it, it seems to work off some hidden (to me) identifier. So only the VV,WW section (12 characters) of the bit that identifies this account as me seems uniquely generated based on my email. Not sure if that even has implications yet but it seems an odd way of doing it.

<snip>
Edit: VV,WW isn't really unique at all, it's generated from your email address but it always generates the same 12 characters for that email address. So you have 12 characters that are always generated from a user's email address then the rest of the userid is static based on, I presume, some hidden variable.

I have a feeling that the algorithm that runs from emails to codes and vice versa isn't very good (read: needs urgently changing). So, even if you don't have an email with them, if someone gets a code it'll accept, it'll send an email out to the email account that matches the code.

[Senko]

Rofl that you make a thread about this i'm allready getting mails like this for 4+ years for different games , pretty much plishing mails so dont click on the link...

Except this has nothing to do with phising.

Phishing is attempting to acquire information (and sometimes, indirectly, money) such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

These e-mails are 100% legimate coming from GW2/ANet services, it won't matter if you ever click that link or not because if you notice the second e-mail that comes after the e-mail containing the link, it states that the e-mail address has been succesfully changed, making the link pointless.

These threads are gonna be popping up like wildfire so I'm gonna throw down what we've seen so far,

1) A select group of people have received 2 e-mails, whether they actually own GW2 or if they just have ancient accounts from GW1/GW2 beta sign up, it doesn't matter, the e-mails will have the subjects "Confirm new e-mail address for your Guild Wars account" followed by the later e-mail "The e-mail address for your Guild Wars account has been changed."

2) Those who were unfortunate enough to actually have GW2 will now no longer be able to access their accounts and play the game, regardless of their actual actions prior to this event. For once this does not seem to be related to a user error, since it actually doesn't matter if you click the link or not since they are somehow managing to obtain it even without access to your e-mail. I state that because multiple sources have claimed, including myself who's got nothing at stake here other than curiosity (since I don't own GW2), that their e-mails did not get breached however are no longer able to access their accounts.

3) This all just points to vulnerabilities over at ANet to me, the 'hackers' are able to request new e-mail addresses for your accounts and are deciphering the link that would get generated, which is what the last poster / reddit was suggesting I believe.

[Deleted]

Got these in my inbox today. Impressive seeing as i don't even have an account with them and have no intention of buying the game.

There's nothing impressive about that at all. It's standard procedure.
They're sending these emails out to any address they can get ahold of.

It has absolutely no relevance whether or not you're using the email for the game in question, or even play the game in question.
The only thing that matters, is that your email address is on the list they're sending the mails to.

The list probably wasn't even compiled by the same people sending it out, but sold to them by another black market third party.

It would be lunacy for them to try to gather GW2 account emails.
It would be lunacy for them to try to sort the list into GW2 account emails and non-GW2 account emails.
Because there is a far simpler solution:

They simply mass email everyone on the list, and hope enough people on it are playing GW2, that the small percentage of those, who fall for it, make it worth the small inconvenience the mass spamming is.

I have about 30-50 different emails, because I create one for each use.
I'm getting 4-5 similar emails about WoW on addresses that has absolutely NO relevance to WoW.
One is the email I created and use solely for this website!
The address I created for GW2 hasn't recieved a single spam mail...

[Deleted]

They simply mass email everyone on the list, and hope enough people on it are playing GW2, that the small percentage of those, who fall for it, make it worth the small inconvenience the mass spamming is.

Except of course for the fact that it's not a phising mail at all. It's a genuine mail from ArenaNet if one looks at the sender. The links also go back to genuine ArenaNet sites if one hovers over them to check.

I have a GW2 account, and I received a mail about the e-mail address being changed. (No asking for authorisation, since it was before they brought e-mail aurhorisation online.) I never clicked any links (I never do, because you can never be too sure). The moment I read the e-mail I hopped onto my GW2 account and sure enough "There is no account registered with that e-mail/username".

So yeah, some seem to be spam .. or accounts created with your e-mail address somehow. But some of them are definitely true, and not because someone clicked a link, but pure dumb luck on the hackers part. I still have no idea how they got my account since I never click links and sweep my computer regularly for malware etc.

[sizzlinsauce]

you do know these are real emails. this is from your email address name itself being stolen from blizzard last month. they're trying to get into your accounts(if you have one)

[Deleted]

I still have no idea how they got my account since I never click links and sweep my computer regularly for malware etc.

Then they knew your email.
All they needed was your password.

If you ever used the same password with that same email anywhere else, all they had to do was enter it on the GW2 account page.
They had it in a list.

And that list doesn't necesserily come from Blizzard, as the poster above seems to think is okay to assume. There's been countless other databases that has been compromised, including Sony and mmo-champion. Some companies also sell your email. And email/password lists have been floating around since before those. But with Sony and the other semi-recent hackings it was confirmed that the hackers accessed user information. That isn't the case with the Blizzard incident. Direct your accusations to more reasonable targets...

[Sarix]

So since I got these emails will I not be able to use my email address to play the game if I ever buy it?