Warcraft Hacked: It would never happen...but it did

My husband was hacked.

Exactly how long ago it was that it happened cannot be for certain. We do know that the discovery came hard and fast. The first clue was that my husband was unable to log into his account in the morning. He is a bit of a forum regular therefore he likes to contribute his knowledge of the game. Each morning he logs into the forums to read up on the newest threads and post his reactions. Well, basically he couldn't even log in as the password was changed. The second clue was that upon a quck search of the armory it was noticed that all of his level eighties had been stripped of their gear. The only items that remained were the non-vendorable tier pieces or items alike. Third and final clue was the discovery that our bank guilds had all been emptied of their contents.

The bank guilds value alone was several hundred thousand in liquid assets. The gold itself in the banks were about 980000K. We have Alliance and Horde banks on each servers where our alts play. All in all that was six guild banks that were wiped out within a few hours. To add insult to injury the gold farmers used my husband's maxed out mining toons to farm underneath Sholazar Basin and Wintergrasp. One of his toons was caught selling gold for monetary real life value. This gained him a three day ban from Blizzard. The gold farmers also deleted several of his lower level toons to make room for farming DKs.

Four years of emotional value alongside hard work were erased within a few hours.

How this occurred was thus: my husband was surfing online at the Wowhead search engine. A flash banner appeared and apparently because he hadn't updated the flash player in quite a while so he was infected by a malware ad. Sadly it wasn't simply through that alone. At the same time for some reason or another his Anti-virus was also not enabled. A Trojan promptly took hold of his PC and through that; the hackers were able to compromise his Warcraft accounts. We did not buy gold. We will never do so and yet one of us was hacked. Something we thought would never happen but it did. All due to small careless mistakes on our parts have cost us greatly in-game. Sure, it's all pixels in the end but to what price can you put on emotional investment?

Furthermore, the customer support at Blizzard has been less than helpful. Everything we have been doing to take back his accounts has been through emails and online web forms. My husband's PC is finally secure but the hackers put an authenticator on his accounts making it hard to regain full access. Everytime we tried to make a new password they would simply put a new one of their own to get back control. After several long days of frustration and stress the accounts are back under our full control. Again, this is all via secure email from Blizzard instead of direct communication on the phone with a real person. This greatly brings my faith in their customer service to an all time low. Still I am grateful that at least we are getting tech support even if the emails are simply template blocks of text that are sent out in mass to everyone that has been hacked. Considering how this kind of things affects a person I was hoping for a more personal touch from their dept.

Finally, we are at the investigation stage. There is a very long wait for this to go through but once our story has been verified than Blizzard will either offer my husband a care package or a full restoration. We just hope that his characters can be restored back as the deleted characters held a lot of sentimental value. I of course am hoping that all of the guild bank contents be replenished. Since then I have set up the guild banks to allow one item of withdrawel and no gold withdrawing. The only characters that have control of the banks now are my GMs. I'm far more anal about internet security than my husband and have always used a virtual keyboard to prevent keyloggers from accessing my passwords. It's not always guaranteed that we will never be hacked as mistakes can happen but we will definitely give a hard fight to not be again. 

I'm just honestly not sure if I have the will to play again for some time. The hackers didn't just steal the contents of characters and gold. They stole our sense of security and fun. Two vital emotions that we may possibly never get back.