what it's like to get hacked, and how PWE responded...

tlaborde

So I got "snowed in" a few days ago, and I was at home when I otherwise would have been at work. I decided to login and "get my coins" on each character.

While I was logged in with one character, at the campfire in Neverdeath, I got kicked out. The message said I had logged in at another location.

I didn't worry much because I had just begun to play around in the "gateway" site so I figured it must be my browser doing something. I immediately logged back in again. No problem.

Then it happened again. And again. I closed my browser. Checked task manager to see if there was some "hidden firefox process still running." Nothing. So I logged into the game again.

And found myself standing near a mailbox in the Enclave. With lots of stuff and AD gone. Logs show that I apparently listed some AD for sale and had them all immediately purchased. I bought some too for whatever reason. I even had a "greater bag of holding" somehow go away - don't they bind when you use them? Sigh...

Anyway, I reported it immediately, and began to wait. And wait. And wait. And refresh the page. And ask around in-game for advice. How many hours was this going to take? I report this at like 10am EST.

3 DAYS LATER I finally got a response.

And a very non-satisfactory response too. Just an auto-response. Form letter. We have seen your issue and whatever.... Please respond again with these words in the response or we'll close the ticket since we will assume you don't want us to take any further action.

WTH?

So, I responded, and ANOTHER DAY LATER my character was rolled back. And after that, my account was "temporarily suspended." No note/email from them telling me that this was part of the restore process. Just "suspended." Then later magically working again, with stuff restored.

All's well that ends well I guess. But here are some alarming facts to be aware of:

1) If you report being hacked, it may be 4 days before PWE will set things right for you.

2) There is NO COMMUNICATION with them while you wait. They do what they do, and don't seem to care at all about holding your hand during the process.

3) That whole "please enter a security code because you're logging in from another location" system is entirely <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>. Someone obviously not at my location did this, and did not get the code in the email. My email was open on my second screen the whole time. Apparently these hackers have a way around that system.

4) These hackers move EXTREMELY FAST. From the time I was "kicked out because I was logged in at another location" to the time that I found myself at the mailbox in another zone was about 90 seconds TOPS. In that amount of time, they logged in, moved my character from one zone to another, got to the mailbox to send whatever they did that way, and bought and sold AD/ZEN on the marketplace. That is a lot to do in 90 seconds. This isn't just some guy who is manually doing these things. There must be a bot that handles the stealing once a password is compromised.

Scary stuff.

zebular

. . . We're sorry for your troubles, however the forums are not the place for this type of discussion. Account and Billing Support issues are between Support and yourself.

. . . Just to be on the safe side however, go to https://secure.crypticstudios.com/ and remove any granted access to locations not on your IP Address. Change your password as well and also change your email account's password, for the only way they can get through Account Guard is if your email account was also compromised or they managed to change your game account's email. Since you never lost access to your login, it's most likely your email account was also compromised. Never use the same username and password at other web sites, like fan sites or even email accounts. Never use the same email address on your game account to sign up at other web sites.