Hackers compromise 33,000 SOE accounts

@Baby Choo Choo

ugh, Massively, either you need an edit button or I need to stop posting first thing in the morning lol. My grammar/spelling is really atrocious sometimes and it makes me sad.

@Baby Choo Choo Aye and thanks for posting the "facts" regarding the situation, seems massively is just trying to sensationalize what happened.

@Baby Choo Choo

Moral of the story: Do not use your game credentials on 3rd party sites. ever.

@Unshra

No problemo. Though, to be fair to Massively, I feel they're posting the information perfectly fine. I've seen a few sites and forum threads post this info practically the same way.

The problem comes with the people reading it. You would be simply shocked how many people just read the title and nothing else. After that, they assume it's been hacked again so they proceed to overreact and spread false information elsewhere.

I'm not trying to police the world or anything, I'm just trying to stop the chaos here before it starts lol

Also, random tip for anyone who is interested, there is this program called Keepass that keeps track of passowrds and generates new ones and let's you copy and paste them from the program to whatever you need. I recommend it if you have trouble keeping track of account info. The file with the passwords is password protected, encrypted, and is only stored locally on your own machine. You can also install if on a UBS thumb drive if you want/need to have your passwords on hand at all times.

Also, for secret questions, try not to put an answer that makes sense. For you first teacher, put the name of a fruit. For your favorite movie, name the food you hate the most. Well, it doesn't have to be EXACTLY like that, but you get the idea. The reasoning behind this is if someone trying to hack into your account and they NEED this info then putting in an inconceivable answer makes it a thousand times harder to pick the right one.

It's the end all, be all of password protection, but it's a step in the right direction. Browse smarter, be safer.

@Unverfied B

Agreed, that's also a very good suggestion.

@Baby Choo Choo

Yeah Engadget had a better title to this story, "Sony locks 93,000 PSN and SOE accounts due to 'massive' hack attempt ". I read the Massively title as Sony being hacked again.

@Baby Choo Choo The person who is not the account holder logging in is not being hacked to you? Gamer, please!

@Daemodand

You've misread what I wrote. I said Sony was not hacked and I stand by that, What we have here is someone taking info from source A and using it to try and access source B.

If I take your Massively info and log into your WoW account, does that mean I just hacked into Blizzard? Not at all.

I honestly don't know what to call it, but I don't think hacking is the right word to describe this. I guess technically hack is the acceptable word for some, but I dislike it because it implies something else, something wrong, to a whole bunch of people. The accounts that were affected were due to people who didn't change their password after the attacks earlier this year or people who use the same username/password combo for everything.

Any 'hacking' that occurred this time is more user-error than anything else.

@Unshra
It's been sensationalized in a lot of places, and honestly, stuff like this is exactly why I find less and less reason to show up at Massively. If I knew of an alternative for MMO news, I likely wouldn't at all.

@Channel84
and thru the use of brute force method?!! T_T

@Channel84

Brute force, in the end, means everyone affected had weak or already compromised passwords. Plus, SOE/PSN weren't hacked; instead, the miscreants started throwing lots of combinations of usernames and passwords at the login sites to see which ones worked.

In the end, anyone who follows basic security measures (unique passwords, which can't be easily guessed, and changing passwords if you ever suspect your previous one was compromised) was just fine.

@(Unverified)
They know credit card info was not leaked because they were not actually hacked.

When you log into the game, can you see your credit card number? When you log into your account management site, can you see it? No. And that's all that happened here -- the criminals were using logins and passwords that they had from other sources and trying to use them to log into SOE services.

Now if I were to log into EQ2 under your account I could make purchases through the store and then trade unbound items to another account for later sale for in-game gold. But I would never see your credit card info.

NOBODY accessed SOE's databases. Therefore, no data was copied from those databases. SOE was NOT hacked.

@Syesta
brute force IS a form of hacking
low level kind that seem almost obsolete nowadays

@Channel84

you might as well say social engineering is a low level kind that seem almost obsolete nowadays.

Brute force attacks is still one of the most widely used hacks in the world. just because it's an old method doesn't mean it's not effective, nor used much.