Thank you Mike for your reply concerning my wifes account

#1 - Oct. 23, 2012, 5:20 p.m.

Mike,

Thank you for your long reply to that other post. I was unable to post a reply to yours because I guess you locked the topic.

I will take your word for it that you guys haven’t been hacked; however, something is going on — more than just your customers home security issues. GW2 is rampant with Bots being created from hacked accounts. My wifes was just one such incident. To think that all these bots running around are the product of failed home security measures are beyond naive.

I have no idea how my wifes account was hacked, nor do I know how the many others were hacked. I do know this. Our internet security here at the house is extremely robust. I play 11 other MMO’s currently. I have played MMO’s since EverQuest. We’ve never had an issue like this. Again, our home security is beyond tight.

Other MMO’s, that I play, are not having this issue to this scale either. Rift did in the very beginning but they nipped the problem quickly.

TL/DR:

There is a reason that GW2 is quickly gaining the reputation of a Bot infested game. We aren;t making this stuff up Mike. Something has happened.

Respectfully,
Klarick

P.S

And yes, the wife and I both recieved emails from ANet asking us to change our passwords. This was some time ago. Not sure who told you that ANet didn’t send out emails, but you may want to give that a look.

MikeLewis

#2 - Oct. 23, 2012, 6:09 p.m.

Thanks for your reply. For the record, I didn’t lock the other topic, and I’m not actually sure who did; my apologies for the confusion.

There are indeed a lot of bots, and this is something we are actively working on curtailing. In fact we’ve made some great strides in this area and hope to see some really visible results in-game in the next few weeks. Rest assured we take this issue very seriously and are working as hard as we can on getting it taken care of.

We keep close track on the number of compromised accounts and it is certainly not enough to explain the volume of bots in-game. Sadly, there are plenty of other sources for these accounts besides just stolen credentials; I can’t go into much detail beyond that, unfortunately.

I have no reason to believe that your personal security practices were at fault here; what we typically see is that it’s some third party’s security that is compromised, and account information is harvested from other services. If any of your passwords happen to be used in multiple online services, and one of those other services is breached, it is entirely possible for an attacker to obtain that password and try it against a multitude of services (such as GW2). We are aware of other services that have been compromised in the past and their databases of account information have been used to try and break into GW2 accounts. All it takes is one stolen database and everyone is suddenly at risk.

This is why we strongly encourage all of our players to select unique passwords for Guild Wars 2 and not reuse them for any other service. This is a good habit to be in generally, and for someone who is security conscious such as yourself, it’s a great tool to have in the arsenal against attackers.