Guild Wars 2

In many other MMOs I’ve played, there is usually a message posted in the announcement thread in the main forum to warn players of phishing websites to help prevent account hacks, but I don’t see one here so I decided to make this topic.

Many probably know what phishing websites are, but for those who don’t know – they are websites that tries to obtain your information about your gw2 account, and even credit card info. Whether it’s through some type of malware or, you unknowingly and willingly give them your info.

One example, which had happened to another MMO game I’ve played are GOLD SELLING SITES! As it is hard for someone who don’t know how to make lots of money in this game, and have real life money to spend, you might be tempted on purchasing gold from these gold selling sites because they give you a better bargain. DON’T! Just don’t buy it from these sites, don’t support them or give any of your account or credit info to them, just don’t visit them either because it is likely that there is malware on it. These gold sellers will use your credit card info to buy more accounts and make more bots, or take over your account for their bots.

I know that A-Net is doing their best to stop these botters, but they are ignoring the source of these botters (since I don’t see any warmings of phishing websites)

I also have another unfortunate news tonight as I am writing this post. One site that I love to go to and I know that many players are using as a game source for their news is guildwars2guru.com. Please do not visit this site until further notice as it has become an attack page with some harmful malware that might try to steal private information. My scanners had just picked it up as an attack page, and I know that not many players have good internet security programs installed.

Thanks for reading,
Neo

SO, gold seller sites are bad (check)

guru’s security is weak. (check)

Both were pretty obvious and well known facts.

Guildwars2Guru is shut down on google

I don’t know how long you’ve been around but at least during the first month Anet was very clear about them trying to stop account hacking. Ever heard of the password blacklist. If I remember correctly Anet are able to see all the hack attemts the hackers are doing trying to use usernames and passwords from other databases hoping for a match. Anet have taken all the passwords used during such attemts and banned them from use for all players. last thing I heard it contained over 20 millions passwords.

Just don’t say Anet isn’t warning people about hacking issues.

I’ve been here since beta, yes I was aware of the news in the first month. Like you said – it was in the first month. What about new players to the game. These players are not aware of such hack warnings during the first month. More specifically, I am saying that Anet doesn’t go into more details about how hackers are obtaining info, they just simply state that they exists and tell us to be careful on the log in page, which not all people read fine prints and warnings. Judging from the amount of new bots that are appearing, it proves that there are still a lot of people everyday (out of the 1-2 million players/games sold) who are not aware of phishing sites and gold selling sites, and are falling for such traps.

Currently, from the news updates, it seems that they are so focused on identifying bots and banning those accounts as far as creating a certain department of people for it, but not really doing much to mitigate the sources of the problems. Bots and hacks are the after math of phishing and gold sites. They should promote more awareness of it. I open the game launcher, and there is like no warnings about phishing and gold selling sites, only that memo that tells you to consider changing your pass word. You can do this, but if you fall into a trap, your newly changed password is only as good as your old password. Or you can have a bunch of people submitting tickets that they forgot their passwords that they are often changing.

Before this game, I played another MMO that had major hacks and phishing problems some months ago. This game which I probably can’t mention because of the Terms and Conditions has hardly any bots now and huge hacking problems, and it’s not a dead game, and you can go check their forums and it is not filled with forum topics like bots and hackers like GW2 is experiencing now. This is because their moderators and community made it their top priority to educate the players about the phishing and gold selling problems in in-game chats system messages, and message broads – instead of “gms, go find and hunt those bots. Go team go!”

Yeah, it’s pretty well known bots are from accounts stolen from people that bought bot-gold.

Kinda hilarious if you ask me. It’s like gold sellers never lose any gold, and get free accounts for more bots.

Take note, guild sites are favorite places to farm passwords for hackers since the majority have little to no security at all. If you are going to use these sites, then make sure all names/passwords/email accounts are totally different than your official GW account.