Starting WoW Again - Account Hack Prevention?

milehigh · June 2010

So, about, 5 months ago, I decided to subscribe to WoW. Fun game, had friends playing, got a mage to about level 20. Good times.

Then one day 3 months ago or so I get an email from Blizzard saying "blah blah changes to your account, if you did not request blah blah."

I login and find that my pathetic mage had been deleted, and like 4 characters, all with names of akjdfjifd, have been created on my account on every server. Took me a few hours of emails to Blizzard until I felt confident my account was closed. I didn't want to deal with this.

Account closed, another friend led me to EQ2, also a fun game, but I know more people playing WoW more often. I'd like to play again.

I'm incredibly gunshy about this, because I'm paranoid as hell about my comp/internet security and I have no idea how someone could've gotten that information to begin with.

TLDR: What steps do I need to do to make sure if I resub to WoW I'm not horribly dissapointed in a few months with my account getting hacked? Do I need to do a full spyware/virus scan? A full reformat? Can I even reopen the account that got hacked (with a new, stronger pw) or should I buy a new copy of the game?

SteevL · June 2010

One of the best things to prevent hacking is to get an authenticator.

Not sure about getting your old account back.

CJTheran · June 2010

Generally Blizzard will restore compromised accounts and deleted characters. About..a year?..ago my account was compromised, and all my toons were stripped. I got most of my possessions back, changed password, and threw an authenticator on it.

If you have an iPhone or Android phone, I believe there are free apps that act as authenticators.

Lykouragh · June 2010

You need an authenticator, as these fine gentlemen have said. That will (probably) keep your WoW account safe.

That said, the fact that your account was compromised in the first place means that either you were phished, or you have a keylogger on your machine. If you don't know what phishing is, go learn and be safer! If you are confident you were not phished, you need to identify and remove that keylogger, because it can be used to steal other, potentially more valuable information from you.

milehigh · June 2010

It may have been phishing...I really don't think so though. How can I be sure there's no keylogger on here? Is a Spybot/AVG scan adequate?

Lykouragh · June 2010

milehigh wrote: »

Is a Spybot/AVG scan adequate?

No. I got my account compromised via a keylogger about 2 years back. AVG didnt' find it, spybot didn't find it, MSE didn't find it, Avira didn't find it, MBAM didn't find it, finally some more obscure AV called Bitdefender found it but couldn't kill it. I still have no idea how I got it. I ended up reformatting.

There's a good computer security thread in the Technology subforum. The short version of my advice is 1. consider reformatting if you haven't for a long time and you have everything you need; 2. if reformatting is not an option, take your hard drive, hook it up to another machine, and hit it with at least 3 active AV scans without booting from it, running any executables on it, or opening any files on it.

Kotenk · June 2010

You probably won't be able to get items back, but deleted characters pretty much stick around forever - anything above 60 does for sure.

Wicked Uncle Ernie · June 2010

milehigh wrote: »

It may have been phishing...I really don't think so though. How can I be sure there's no keylogger on here? Is a Spybot/AVG scan adequate?

It absolutely was phishing. Never respond to a "Blizzard" e-mail asking for any sort of account information. Also don't follow links to Blizzard's site. Just use a bookmark you have made, or use the address bar. Account stealing dweebs are like a plague for Blizzard. They ought to ship an authenticator out with their games for free.

milehigh · June 2010

Well, I just created a Battle.net account with a fresh email account purely for WoW. Fun stuff, Gmail flags the validation email as spam (as in, they send an email to validate your email address, go to your account and follow the link to validate).

I can follow that link...right? I checked the origins of the email and everything checked out (all Blizzard addresses, no redirects). I'm paranoid as hell, but now I have the authenticator on my phone as well and that's the only email I've had to follow.

God, it's pretty ridiculous how much of an issue this is. Guess I'll go forward from here and try and get back to 20

Lykouragh · June 2010

The link is very likely kosher. As long as the domain for the link is battle.net (the target of the link, not the text of the link), then you are fine.