Tuesday, April 29, 2008

So I got hacked last week ...

Earlier last week I realized that I had to bail out of raiding for a few weeks because my two nephews, ages 5 and 3 were coming to visit (they arrived late last Friday) . As an aside, the only thing more stressful than two kids, are two kids whose biological clocks are set to halfway around the world. Imagine the two most hyperactive kids in the world ... then imagine them waking up at 11pm and not going to bed until 3pm the next day.

... zzz ...

What was I talking about again? Oh yeah! Getting hacked!

Anyway, I logged on late Saturday afternoon to say hi to guildies, show off my new Wildfury Greatstaff, all that jazz. So I'm on for around an hour, say byebyes to the guild for the day, then try to go get some rest before the kids wake up.

I check my email the next day, Sunday morning, and find a PM from one of my fellow officers. Apparently I had logged on very late at night on Saturday on my various toons, raided the entire guild bank, then transferred all the non-soulbound items to a different character.

So I immediately logged on to WoW, and sure enough, my toons were ransacked. Most of my saleable gear was gone, either sold to the vendor or transferred off to a different person, the guild bank was empty save for some consumbles that some guildies had put in there after the incident. My 70 rogue alt still had all his equipped gear, and Minmon still had some gear that couldn't be vendored, but other than that ... nada.

My first reaction was sadness that, even with just half the gear on my druid, he could still dps better than my rogue.

My SECOND and more sane reaction was shock. Damn ... it's like a robbery, you hear about it on the news, you hear about people that it's happened to, but you never expect it to happen to you.

Despite it all though, I was actually surprised that I wasn't as mad as I had originally imagined I would be if I got hacked. After thinking about it, there were several factors involved:

1) Losing the gear did not diminish the fun I had getting it in the first place. My t5 skirt was off our first FLK kill, and the fact that they were gone didn't diminish the feeling the entire guild had when it dropped. My belt of natural power was gone, but it didn't change the fact that I got the pattern after our sloppiest Hydross kill EVAR (some hunter forgot to switch sides, pulled aggro, and much silliness ensued as we tried to dps Hydross down before him and his 12 friends murdered the whole raid). The loot was just a side-effect of having fun, not the cause of it.

2) Blizzard was very prompt with help. I emailed the GMs about my account that same Sunday I found out about the hack. I talked to a GM live just yesterday, and I got an email earlier today stating most of the important pieces of gear that I had was restored. Most of my gold is still gone, as is most of the stuff in my bank, but for the most part I'm functional again.

3) I am not holding back guild progression. I was going to be on hiatus for a few weeks anyway, so if there ever is a good time to get hacked, it's now.

4) It has been reaffirmed that my guild is the most awesomest guild in the history of the universe! I was immediately beset with offers of help from my fellow guildies to get back on my feet. It's always awesome to know you have friends around when bad crap happens.

5) I get to make a lot of Chinese farmer jokes!!! I'm fairly certain my guildmates will be sick of them by the end of May, but to heck with that!!!

So yeah, that's my "getting hacked" story. It's not as dramatic and tear-jerking as some of the others that I've read, but I did learn stuff from it! That's good right?

Oh, and Vic, if you're reading this ... umm ... my system is clean, so can you please promote me from Gnome now? Please?

2 comments:

Loni Huff said...

OUCH! Sorry to hear about that!! Were you ever able to determine the culprit of the hack?

Minmon said...

Well, a bunch of my guildies found a low level toon selling stuff that looked suspiciously like our stuff, but nothing really certain.

My system checked out clean after using several different antivirus/antispyware software, so I probably got keylogged when I accessed the WoW forums at the Uni.

Thanks for the well wishes.