I’d like to thank Anet support for re-instating access to my account, I can’t praise them highly enough, especially Barracuda, and Marlin.
Ok serious part of this post time.
I recently had my account hacked. However this was no ordinary hack. What I believe happened, was that my NCSoft Master Account was somehow compromised. Don’t ask me how because I haven’t even logged into it since 2011.
Next I believe they changed the e-mail address for the NCSoft account, and then proceeded to change the passwords to two Guild Wars accounts attached to that account. One of the two affected accounts was attached to both GW1 and GW2.
Now here is where it starts getting weird. All through this I had NO e-mails. None from NCSoft, when (I assume) the attached e-mail address was changed), and again none from Anet when GW2 was accessed. I also had an authenticator attached to the GW2 account at the time. And yet somehow they managed to login to both GW1 and GW2 accounts, bypassing the authenticator.
Now I know some of the questions that people are thinking of..
No the passwords were not stupidly simple to guess (the GW2 password WAS 9SeIdeYcAqS699VL52V5ZL9upNKc1, yes 29 characters long for example)
No-one has access to my PC, (which was turned off at the time), indeed no-one has even been inside my home in over a year (yeah I’m a real sociable type, see my username for example).
Scans by MBAM, Spybot and MSE all say nothing was found, so it’s highly unlikely to be a keylogger or other trojan, especially as I haven’t even accessed NCSoft in over 2 years.
My mobile, with the only copy of the authenticator (and it’s secret key), has NEVER left my possession.
So the issue is, how kitten did my account get compromised? And what can be done to prevent this happening again (and to other people).
