Do hackers ever stop here?

To whoever asked, yes, I received a spam pm regarding buying ecto and zkeys for real money. Deleted it asap.

If I would have realized what the people were talking about in this thread, I probably wouldn't have started my own one in Q&A.

I'm facing a similar issue of losing a lot of stuff, and it has also happened to me just these past couple days. I've done nothing out of the ordinary that would warrant an opening for a hacking.

Omg, I almost got shocked from reading this.

Ok, so I read this, and went to my characters just to make sure they are ok. Then when I clicked on one of the characters, it was in GtoB, and I literally said to myself "O god, I got hit" but turned out all the stuff is there, my zealous scythe seemed to have moved all on its own(0.o?) but everything is all there.

But yeah....running a virus scan right now.

You can get accounts back with your serial number if you know it I believe.. not sure what to say though but I have heard of something being done through this way. I'd suggest writing down all your passwords and logins on a USB drive and then encrypt an archive with them inside.

have any of you bought gold online or items?

like..registering with your email on some gold site..?

my friend got his account hacked...and said that the last thing he did was buying zkeys from a site..and guess what is more strange..is that the trader asked him any mini pets so the trade would look "normal". he didn't loose much other than the keys he bought..since he's fairly new and only has a lvl 20 character. He said that he logged in and his character was in Great temple...this looks fishy as heck. But that would teach him, i told him to stop since he would get banned eventually..he changed his pass and email too.

Antivirus will NOT be able to detect anything brand new or anything that its creators failed to notice. Custom, specifically targeted malware rarely gets discovered and analyzed.

Don't trust AV with your security. Ever. It won't save your ass when it matters.

Then what will? Being a huge brain and knowing what every file does? It's not perfect but it's not "ever".

What he meant is that if the virus is a new kind of virus, the AV wouldn't necessarily recognize it as being malicious since its creators usually are intellegent enough to make sure the virus won't be delected easily by normal AV. Remember downadup? Got the FBI into the mess, that's how bad some virus can be.

But if its just a normal trojan you AV should delect it.

You lost me. I've got boxes for two of the campaigns, so producing keys/serials for those should be no trouble. The encryption of passwords and such sound like something I'll have to look up how to do.

That is exactly what happened to my husband's character a few months ago. Nothing deleted, no customised items taken, just tormented/everlasting tonics with a bizarre axe in it's place.
He is an extremely paranoid network admin guy and runs a firewall box, scans everything, knows not to download anything.
*shrug* Anet do not ever say anything about it, so it looks like this will continue to be an ongoing problem.

If you can't access your old plaync account or the email address you used for it, then make a new account, go to the support section and tell them that. Since it looks like you were hacked (were you? You didn't actually lose very much, and hackers tend to strip accounts. Maybe a roommate? Annoying little brother? )

Anyway. Make a new plaync account, go to the support area, to the "Ask A Question" part. Not the easiest to find, but shouldn't be very hard. Tell them about your predicament, with as many details as you can. Make sure to mention that you don't have access to your old email address, or to your old plaync account, and wish to get your plaync account back. Off to show them the serials you used (NOT on the public support site, but they email you, and you can send stuff through there.)

You'll get some random "Hello Name, I've sent your question to somebody who is in charge of stuff like that" email, then you have to wait.

You'll be asked for some stuff like the street address you first used for the plaync account, the name you used, maybe the last four numbers of the credit card you used for purchases through plaync.

If you can prove to them that you are actually you, they will change the email address of your old plaync account to the one you use now (or another you provide), and email a "Password Reset Form" to you. Once inside your plaync account, you can change your password for both it and GW.

And after a couple of days you get a "plaync support survey" about how satisified you are with the help you got ^_^

Just don't go all rant-y and start cursing them out. Far too many people do that and they just don't bother to help you if that's the case, since most "hacking" incidents are the fault of the user.

Hope all that helped. I had a similar problem (thought I actually lost quite a lot of stuff), and I got my account back

Edit: For the encrypted archive thing... just use Winrar or 7Zip to create the archive, and in the process, there's a small "Make password" checkbox or something like that. Use that. Or, if you trust your family/friends, write them down and keep the paper in a book that never leaves your room.

I got what he meant but how he said it was over top. Reminded me of propaganda

Don't trust AV with your security. Ever. It won't save your ass when it matters.

I would assume that the "bizarre axe", quest items, red irises etc., are all there to make a valid trade - the hackers/thieves believing that they are safer not making a one-sided trade when they loot your account.

A worrying trend.

yes, that's what I was referring to an archive (RAR/ZIP/7z/etc) that has some password in place before opening it. WinRAR costs a little bit but 7z is free.. it should be a similar program though. I know there is a "hide all files" style option too.. that way unless you put the password in you can't even see what's inside, could be anything.

Ok, something is going on.

Something is going on, my PvE warrior was at temple. I have 5 z-keys but that is it. I had a Armor of Salvation in my inventory. Thank god I had a money dump and was broke.

Who is this mysterious person who has a fetish for zkeys !? Must be someone who is high zaishen ranked ! (i feel safe being banned, gl to him getting onto my acount. You guys got owned.)

if your are able to log into your account u don't need to worry about a plaync account anymore u can change your pw by changing your account at the bottom they did away with needing the plaync as a lot forgot their pw and so on and not being able to access the emails

1- I'm not sure about this but if the game doesn't lock the acount after several failed attempts at accessing it then gw isn't safe enough from brute force attacks. what I'm saying is that the game should lock the acount say after you try 3 times to enter a wrong password (never tried it so not sure, maybe the game already does this)

2- another thing is that some people register on sites to buy virtual money. if you used the same email to register as the one you use in your game account then you gave them a chance to brute force your account (thats if the game doesn't have a safe mechanism like what I described in point 1). Now if you used the same password also then you can't blame them for hacking you .. although I doubt anyone would do such a stupid thing.

3- clicking on a link that someone offered you might make your pc download a keylogger that can steel your username and password. I'm not an expert in security but some times even visiting such sites might make your pc download a keylogger (depends on the latests exploits for windows ans IE).

I don't want to sound like I'm an expert or something but seriously I don't see how an account can get hacked if you don't give your details to anyone and you also don't visit such sites that offer virtual currency.

In any case, I hope this doesn't become an epidemic that makes people leave gw cos if that happened to me then I'm sure I'll stop playing gw.

I seriously hope anet can get to the root of this thing since its not just a simple case of a 1 guy got hacked. Goodluck guys and I realy feel bad for you guys

to OP, you are very lucky to not have ur main deleted

last month i was hacked. i had 2 characters deleted so i emailed ncsoft (waste of time). later that day i was playing, just running around town then i get err7. by the time i log back on all my characters were deleted.

the only weird thing is nothing at all was missing just all my characters gone. had 1700 ectos at the time but i dont know why they didnt take that..
im more pissed about my main being deleted with 26 maxed titles

guys, this stuff is scary, I hope Anet finds out soon what is happening.