The Daily Grind: What would you do if your account were compromised?

@Ocho

"Sidenote... my credit card not long ago was stolen through my iTunes account because Apple's servers were hacked... I'm pretty sure not all of these hacks are the users fault and Blizz most likely has been hacked a number of times, but good luck getting them to admit it"

Frankly, if Blizzard's servers were that easily compromised, I suspect they'd do MUCH worse than just swipe account info.

Also, I'm not a lawyer but aren't they legally required to disclose security compromises that result in personal information being leaked?

@Eamil

I'm not sure about the laws, but if every time someone's personal information was stolen it had to be warned, my guess is we'd be hearing about it a LOT more than we do now. Gizmodo was recently hacked, and they put out an article and help requests, but when Apple was hacked and I was affected, I found an article written about the incident, but there was NOTHING from Apple warning iTunes customers about the leak (to be fully honest, my iTunes account was NOT hacked. My credit card information was taken from their databases. So my account was not compromised.), so if they didn't have to, my guess is there is no strict law about it.

But really, the rash of account thefts is too big to be true. Are you really telling me that every single person out there who has had their accounts stolen is simply from a keylogger/trojan or phishing scam? That all of the tech savvy people I know who know better are still dumb enough to fall for scams or not know when their system is infected? These sort of scams/trojans catch fewer people and the amount of people compromised compared to that just doesn't add up.

Although, I would totally have agreed with you prior to my account being compromised, more blaming the end-user. But in this day, its not just the users being targeted.

@Ocho You gotta know that "Blizzard's database got hacked" is a hard sell. On the other hand, fansites get hacked all the time, and yes people are foolish enough to use identical emails for both Battle.net and related fansites. And yes other people are just dedicated enough to try those emails and passwords against Battle.net, among other things.

The NCsoft "security issues" someone above mentioned were the same thing -- an Aion fansite was hacked, and those emails were used for phishing and for brute forcing across several of NCsoft's games. It's a different kind of user-error than using 123456 as your password or getting keylogged for sure, but it's still user-error.

I've never been hacked personally, but several of my guildies have been in WoW (leading to our guild vault being compromised too). Blizzard has been nothing but prompt and polite and helpful, honestly. Kind of a shock!

@Brianna Royce

I tried Aion for a week or two and then decided it wasn't the game for me. I let my free month run out and never looked back.

Fast forward a month or so, and I received an e-mail from NCSoft saying my Aion account had been compromised. The account that had been closed. Someone had stolen it and paid for a month's playing time. I replied to the mail (which contained no links, by the way) and a back-and-forth ensued. The NCSoft rep changed my NCSoft main account password and I managed to get in and change it to something else. I checked Guild Wars, which I hadn't played in a while, and fortunately nothing had happened to it. Neither had anything happened to my CoX account. Only Aion was affected.

And I never, ever visited, let alone subscribed to, any Aion fansite.

A thorough scan of my machine found nothing suspicious.

A while later I resubbed to WoW, after not having played it for almost a year. I was hoping to get the spark back for Cataclysm. I logged in, did a few dailies, chatted with an ex-guildie and then logged out again. Didn't log back in for a week or two because of work. Summer started and I found myself with some extra time on my hands, so I wanted to get some good WoW time in. I logged in, only to find out I couldn't. Someone had stolen my account and slapped an authenticator onto it.

I contacted Blizzard and the following day my account was reinstated, and by the next day I had all my stuff back.

Again, a thorough check came up with nothing suspicious on my machine.

Of course this was after Blizzard changed the log-in name to the e-mail address. In my five years of actively playing WoW, I hadn't been "hacked" once.

Obviously, there are ignorant and stupid people, sharing account details and not having taken proper security measures. Some of those will get their accounts compromised.

But there are also people who, though no IT-professionals, are computer-savvy enough to know not to do certain things. I'd like to think I'm in the latter group. But I did become a victim of account theft, twice in the same year.

NCSoft had a security problem. They only admitted it after the shit had well and truly hit the fan. But they started out by blaming the victims. If it can happen to them, it can happen to Blizzard. People aren't perfect, but neither are big companies.