"Solid one-two punch": Trion responds to account hacks

@kgptzac

Yep. Thats one my of my biggest MMO pet peeves, people assuming that if someone is hacked they have a keylogger or were stupid with their account info.

@drakon

People assume this because 99% of the time, it is the case that the victim HAS been hit with a keylogger, phished, or been loose with their credentials. (It can be very difficult to avoid all the sources of keyloggers, unfortunately. Especially with things like 0-day Flash vulnerabilities running rampant online.)

Fixing this vulnerability was a must, however, and I'm glad that Trion owned up to it and fixed it ASAP. We do not know how many people with compromised accounts were actually impacted by this. I suspect most breached accounts since launch were the result of "traditional" means rather than this attack, however. (We also don't know how difficult this attack really was to pull off since the details were not disclosed.)

I also am glad to see the coin-lock feature and that two-factor authentication is planned.

Ultimately, whatever the cause of the account breach in a specific user, the true fault lies with the RMT sellers and those that buy from them rather than people who just randomly got their accounts broken into.

@(Unverified) It's really not hard to skip RIFT articles, You just scroll past them.

This has been a public service announcement.

@(Unverified) Get used to it ;)

@(Unverified)
if you don't want to see rift articles then use this link

http://massively.joystiq.com/exclude/rift/

@(Unverified)

Haters gonna hate.

@Rindon
Oh, and yes, I am also sick of hearing about Rift :-)

@Rindon Because nobody cares about UO or EQ1.

It really sounds like you didn't even read the linked article.

@Graill440 "the numbers may be more than the 1% quoted by Hartsman"

Translation: You have no idea how many accounts have been hacked. Nor do you understand why, how, or care.

"the foprums are rife with complaints about the customer service or actual non existance of it. WHich leads many to believe they have more problems than they let on."

You are simply trolling Rift threads.

There, I fixed it for you.

20 days after the game launched, they release the coin lock system; how is customer service non-existent?

Troll harder please.

@socialenemy2007

People are throwing around the phrase "Troll" too loosely and especially in response to criticism of RIFT.

Holding and expressing an opinion in a forum that is contrary to the forum dedicated to it is not Trolling. Expressing concerns about or raising issue with problems concerning a thing is not Trolling. Doing so to bait people into an argument is Trolling.

For people who have had to wait two weeks or more for restoration of their characters (I know of one personally who has been waiting and is still waiting this long) in light of a backdoor in Trion's security that was about the size of a truck might consider Trion's response time inexcusable and their customer service non-existent. Rightly so, I would say.

This is an issue Trion had tried to sweep under the rug and only recently admitted to and began to fix when it became apparent that the issue was on their end.

And to all the apologist fanboys; for a company who's ad campaign has repeatedly suggested that their world is better than Blizzard's is even now, why would you give them a pass on not having an authenticator?

@silvertemplar

I agree that using the email address is not the wisest choice, and I don't like this trend of everyone wanting to use an email address as a logon. Yes, it makes it easier to remember, but at the same time this means a lot of people use the same login ID for their email, Facebook, Twitter, and all their games. And many likely use the same password because it's hard to remember them all.

This is why I keep a separate logon for each game account I have. I have completely separate email addresses for WoW/Battle.net, RIFT, Steam, PSN, and so forth.

@Ably

Kudos firstly, for being one of the handful who have some idea on the difference, but a small correction is needed.

Hacking is about the problem solving process, but isn't computer related - a model railway club is widely accredited with being the first hackers, after setting up a remote switching system using old phone parts - no code used. In some cultures, one will use "hack something together" in place of "jury rig it". MacGyver is a great example of a hacker, actually.

Every situation has a set of rules that govern it, from games we play, to social interaction(Etiquette, social conventions, etc) to plain walking down the street(physics). A hacker is just someone who finds a problem, and uses every advantage/method they can in overcoming it, but doesn't follow convention.

Most crackers are hackers, in this sense(but not all hackers are crackers). hackers could also be people developing vaccines, working on new car engines that use lettuce as fuel, or the guys who put a rat brain into a robot(youtube "robot rat brain"). They're also the guys who make the anti-viruses, firewalls, encryption protocols and so forth we use to defend against crackers(along with most of your computer, servers and software, actually).

Updating the article, especially considering you're praising a hacker, would be a pretty respectful move, tbh. Yes, I know most of the audience is ignorant of the difference but that doesn't mean you shouldn't at least try to educate them, since 99% of them aren't idiots.

@Ably

Yay for semantics!

/sarcasm