Recent Accounts that were hacked

i dont know if theres a thread about this already but i havent managed to find one so i figured id make one.

im trying to look at this impartially but its hard, ill explain why in a minute.
the bulk of people who had their accounts hacked that one weekend that did NOT have their chars deleted but had items on the character loaded or storage account taken. a few people i know had this happen to them, some lost ectos, others lost valuable mini pets, etc. ive just heard from some people that Anet has tracked their items(or some of them, not all) and are giving them BACK to the original account holders they were stolen from.

now i dont know anything about the mechanics of what happened, how it happened, who did it etc but what i DO know is that as someone who has had my account hacked previously and having everything deleted, i am slightly disappointed that no action(to my knowledge) was taken to try to trace anything from my account. i understand that there were quite a few affected from this particular bulk incident but i just feel slightly disappointed, as im sure others will.

do you think this is fair? or do you think anet was right in their actions in retreiving some stolen items from this last incident?

I really doubt this is happening. It's a rumor at best. Anet has never given back account items and I don't see any reason that would be changing.

One of my guildies is one of the people who got hacked that weekend - they were only looking into how it was happening and a way to stop it. I can promise you that he didn't get a single piece of gold back. In fact, when he talked to Gaile about it, she said that it would involve a rollback of the servers, which is certainly not going to happen a month after the fact.

Anet cant track anything

Sorry, I'm pretty sure noone is getting anything back

I believe you're referring to this incident?
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...t=zkeys+hacked

This wasn't an isolated issue, it was a large attack in a short period of time.


Most of the time when people get "Hacked" its their fault somehow(leaving passwords laying around,giving them out,3rd party programs).

EDIT: Didn't hear anything about items being returned either.

unless someone is sending false emails adressed as an arenanet employee then yes, they are getting SOME of their items back.

Yeah, actually, I would put money on that being exactly what's happening. Like I said, my guildie has nothing back, and I really don't see Anet giving some things back to some people and not everybody. Happen to have one of these emails to share?

No... the poeple you "heard from" are simply misinterpreting this... "so we would like to get in touch with the players who were affected..."

They incorrectly presume that Anet getting in touch with them equates to Anet giving them their stuff back.

They are not going to rollback the servers 30 days.

Its easy to fake sender information for people who dont know what to look for in an email. If it says:

Subject: Hacks
To: gw.guru.com
From: [email protected]

It doesn't mean it came from [email protected]. You need to check the path the email followed to find the real origin. You best thing to do is forward it to PlayNC, since its most likely a second attempt to hack your account. There is no way for the items to be created so unless they are doing a server rollback for everyone you won't get anything returned.

Have they ever rolled back the servers?? I cant remember of a single time in my gw "career", and there were some quite wacky stuff going on

they rolled back the servers when all the runes got reset to 250g

i do not have the email as i was not one of the affected but i will see if my friend can give me a copy, assuming this is not some huge secret. as for your friend, tell him to check the email his account is tied to


according to my friend it is from the email address that emailed him originally in response to the incident(when people affected were asked to email that specific email address) so no, it is not a false email.

If it's possible for A-Net to track, find and recover the actual items that were stolen and return them to their owners then they should do that. When it isn't possible then the player should deal with it. Once ectos have been added to a stack, sold to a trader, sold to a legitimate player, etc, then they should be considered gone. However, if there is a rare mini that is still in the inventory of one that took it to begin with, then it should be returned to it's owner before the theif's account is banned.

This round of hacks seemed different than some of the past ones, and it might be that the items are able to be traced simply because the character wasn't deleted. I don't know, just speculation, but if the stuff can be returned it should be, no matter how many times before (or after) the stuff couldn't be returned.

Equity isn't always the best thing or the right thing.

So what caused the bulk hackings in Feb.? Was it from a keylogged Anet/NCPlay website that wasn't the fault of the victims? Did they get rollbacks on their characters?

I think you guys should just accept it and stop whining about it. If they return items back then it isn't the players fault they got hacked. Anet would never do something against people who can't fight there own stupidity's.

from what i gather, this seems to be the case. someone managed to track the accounts that took the items and took whatever was left over BACK and is planning on giving these items back. i dont know anything about who did it or how it was done like i said but its obviously easier than a roll back to retreive permanently lost items. so in essence, i agree with you, not much they could do or CAN do for that matter, for those who had everything deleted. but as for the fact that they refused to even try and blamed the account holders for the issue and that was their reasoning behind "lol deal with it", THATS what kind of disappoints me.

that being said, im glad my friend is getting whatever they retrieved back.

who is whining? as far as im concearned i was asking what people thought of the issue or if people knew more about it/had heard of it. everyone else thats seemed to have posted in this thread has thought it was either a rumor or not doable.

i would have a more concise response to this if your last sentence made any ounce of sense.

Where were you in game Feb 21, 2009. For people to get their stuff back, EVERYONE on EVERY server would be rolled back to that point. How many titles would you lose, or that elite armor you have picked up since then? Think of the uproar in here if a roll back were to happen over a "handful" of accounts getting missing items back.

The only other possible way to return stuff, ANET people farm all the missing items, and meeting each and every victim in an outpost and trading the items back. I don't think you will see that happen either.

Sad to say, the stuff is gone, no more to return.

That was an accident on their part, not indiscretion on the part of the users. Accounts get "hacked" like this mainly through reused passwords (steal a forum db and try the passwords from each of those users on the related Guild Wars account), active misbehavior by the user (downloading botting programs, macros, add-ins, etc.), and simple trickery (forged emails from Gaile).

It's not ANET's fault if a user invites someone to steal their account by falling victim to "too good to be true" scamming or actively trying to circumvent the rules. It would be nice, however, if the online business community and tech community would make a more active attempt to train the general public about this sort of thing. Just instilling a little bit of a cynicism in a computer user can go a very long way toward improving security, even in someone who has absolutely no technical inclination.

I ment that if people give away there password or use it on a site thats not safe they will be hacked because of what they did theirselves however what happened to these accounts lately wasn't because any of these things but was some mistake in security wich causes the Give-Back of some items.