Guild Wars 2

I’m just curious for now – there seemed to be an uptick in the amount of hacked accounts in the last few days (during the Winterday events). It seemed like the incidents literally exploded with the last few days, and all from the same country (ie China). Is this something that Anet is looking into? Was the door to more hacking open because of the change in Password length (or whatever that post was about) recently?

Yea, I was also thinking a similar thing. I’ve not come to this forum (Account Issues) before i got hacked but since I have been comming here (5 days or so), I’ve seen no end of hacking incidences, is it always like that in this forum?

I have played MMO’s for years and years, since EQ1 kunark days. Even years of WoW and never once have I been hacked till last night on this game. I have always followed standard security stuff for gaming too. Just totally shocking cause I would have bet good money I wouldnt be hacked because I never ever do the things that GET you hacked in the first place like buy gold, use stupid password, get spyware, log in odd sites etc. I always run antivirus/malware/spyware stuff and do maintenance on everything like clockwork. I just honestly dont know how it happened in the first place, and am very curious about it.

The main thing which irks me right now is the fact that there is a lack of information/communiction from the corporate side in regards to these incidents. It’s nice that they set up an Authencitator app for smartphones, but that does not cover all affected players, (they may not all use smartphones, just regular phones) Like most people here this is the first time ever I had my account hacked.

Might as well ask this question here – I was also checking my “Authorized Networks” in my security section, and I saw 4 addresses there. 2 were from my area (which are legit) and 2 are from CN (presuming China)? How do I de-authroize the CN numbers?

Well I activated the smartphone app this morning, and it doesnt ask me to use the code when I log in….since apparently you dont have to use it for “authorized IP’s” now….but when I go into my account on the site my authorized IP list is totally empty, so I have no way to know if someone OTHER than me is authorized or not. The fact I cant see anything there scares me honestly.

I wish they had an option to make it ask every time, or something since they changed it to not need a code when it thinks its “safe” to not need it.

My theory is that the hacks have not just happened, it is people returning to the game for the event and discovering they were hacked. Even though the hack happened during their absence from the game.

I have just noticed a few threads that start with “I stopped playing for X amount of time and came back to find I was hacked”.

Kreidas>> hummm… so you too have China ip in your whitelist and I assume you never authorized those ip and never get email for ip approval? You’ve been targeted by hacker as well! Highly recommend you to change your password for the account and email.

Some of us have the same problem you can read it here.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Authorized-Networks-Removal/

My passwords has been changed. Twice. Hope that’s enough for now. Been that way since…roughly 4-5 days ago?

kreidas.1092:

My passwords has been changed. Twice. Hope that’s enough for now. Been that way since…roughly 4-5 days ago?

I dont think changing passwords will help tbh. Just because hackers can target certain players means that there is a hole in account security (server side). Authenticator app, as stated above, doesnt work as it supposed to and e-mail authentication is of no help if you get authorized networks pop from nowhere.

And for topic itself: many players return into game for holiday events and many purchase gems which means more rich targets for hackers – that is why you can see increase in hacking incidents lately (both fresh and those that were hacked while not playing).

Ive been waitting for a good amount of days now for my account to be restored, and the communication between players and Arena is very poor. I have been hacked aswell, all my gems and gold and items stolen/salvaged/sold, and Arena just confirmed my restoration about a day now but its taking way long to happen. Ive done everything to protect my account, also on my other games ive never expirienced hacking at all only here. Arena needs to help all of us, cause the hackers are using our accounts to get us banned.

I’m really, really afraid that they might have reduced staff because of the holiday season…am wondering if this was a pinpointed atttack by hackers to hit Anet, etc while they have the least staff. Sort of like having a castle with reduced amounts of defenders.

I have had several authorisation attempts from various parts of the world over the last 2 months, played for the first 2-3 weeks but became annoyed with server stability and unable to play PVP, thought i’d pick it up again over the holidays but it’s all fixed but i can’t even access my account, get e-mails saying i have updated my email address and the communication is horrible…

Any other game i have played reseting information such as passwords and game login details has been much easier. I can only imagine that Anet has had a large amount of customer information stolen if there is a rise in hacked accounts.

There has been no information stolen. Mike O’Brien said this about how the hacks are happpening:
“hackers use tens of thousands of different IP addresses to scan through millions of attempted account names and passwords, almost all of which are for accounts that don’t even exist in our database, looking for matches. They’re not guessing or brute-forcing passwords; they’re trying a very specific account name and password for each attempt. For example, account name “joe.user@example.com”, password “alligator101?. If they don’t get a match immediately, they may try a variant like “alligator100? or “alligator102?, then they quickly move on to the next entry on their list.”

Just a bit further down the same post he says:
“But in recent years, a truly staggering number of game companies and web sites have had their account databases breached. These reports of security breaches — 77 million accounts, 25 million accounts, 24 million accounts, untold millions more — may seem abstract, too big to be real, but they’re obviously not. The information stolen from database breaches is worth a lot of money to hackers, who can take the stolen account credentials and use them to attack each new game that’s released.”

So, the account information may have been stolen but not from NCSoft though. You really do get an idea on why it is so important to have an unique password for everything though.

You can see the whole post by Mike O’Brien here, it’s well worth a read.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your concerns. We understand that you might be worried abou the secutity of your data and accounts but we can assure you that the security team has everything safe and under control.

Thanks for your understanding. This thread is closed.