Inside Job? - Blue Tracker

#0 - Oct. 23, 2009, 3:59 a.m.

My friend's account was hacked a few months ago. The first time all but one of her characters were deleted, a bank alt with heaps of gold and items wasn't touched. Password was changed constantly after we contacted blizzard, by the hacker. Even after changing email address on different computers and changing password on different computers they still got in. Computer was reformatted by professional IT technicians who provide security for businesses. She is on a domain network behind a firewall and server with complex passwords.

She got everything back and then everything was fine. The second time happened 2 months after and some of her characters were deleted, some of the items on her main toon were gone blizzard restored some of her items and gold but not her bank alt. When she asked blizzard about it they said there was no record of her bank alt having those items or gold or guild. How can a hacker erase her history on the wow databse?

Then she got hacked again last night and her level 78 dk was deleted and in it's place a level 55 dk with the same name not logged in, newly created. On top of that the guild logs of her level 78 dk had no log of her dk leaving the guild when before when she was hacked it said "Unknown leaves the guild".

Her email is handled on a private small business server and is not hotmail or any web based email where someone can gain access to, easily.

It is impossible for a hacker to hack so many computers that are unrelated to each other, erase blizzard logs and database data unless the hackers works at some level in blizzard.

She was never hacked before she upgraded to a battle.net account and she never had to change her password before then.

Because she has been hacked so many times blizzard has disabled her account with no indication when she will get it back or if she will even get it back.

If you have ever seen the movie 'The Net' it's like battle.net accounts have a backdoor and someone is exploiting it, and we suspect blizzard is making people upgrade, getting hacked so they have to buy authenticators, therefore increasing their profits. With people leaving for aion they need to keep their profits up so this way existing players have to spend more money.

OR there's a hole in the battle.net system that someone has found out about. Why they would target my friend I don't know but we're getting sick of it and we will change to Aion if it isn't fixed.

#54 - Oct. 23, 2009, 2:33 p.m.

Any supposition which assumes that we would purposefully threaten our players' enjoyment of the World of Warcraft is absolutely absurd. We invest an incredible amount of time and money into making this an enjoyable game and do whatever we can to correct the damages caused by malicious parties; it would be counter-intuitive for us to do these things if our desire was to spoil our player's enjoyment of the game.

You're welcome to believe what you will, Zenkai, but the fact of the matter is any assumption which places blame on Blizzard Entertainment for your compromise helps no one. While it is by far the easiest route to take, placing blame on Blizzard will only distract you from the real security concerns that may have resulted in the compromise.

Furthermore, the idea that the Authenticator is easily bypassed is ridiculous. I assist hundreds of players each day, and I have not yet seen an account that has been compromised with an Authenticator attached. You may want to consider an Authenticator for yourself rather thank attempting to discredit a security device that has already proven extremely successful.

Also, please be aware that depending on the amount of time that has passed since a character was deleted, we may be unable to provide restoration. Unfortunately, data storage is limited and deleted character information may be purged occasionally -- especially for lower level characters. No one has accessed a database to erase any data.

I truly wish you both the best and I sincerely hope you are able to identify the source of the compromise.