Nope, not me. I wasn’t hacked. It was much worse actually.
Early Monday morning my wife decided to log on and knock out a few dailies. Being that she’s been using the same password for nearly her entire WoW tenure, it was more than a bit odd that she was unable to log in this particular morning.
Her desk is only about eight feet away from where I’m sleeping, but normally I don’t wake up if she’s on playing in the morning. Daddy needs his sleep. 
Anyway, I suppose I sensed something was not right, because I woke up and immediately saw the invalid login message on her screen. When I asked her what was up, she told me that she couldn’t log in for some reason.
My first thought was perhaps she had caps lock on by accident. Nope. I then told her to check the forums and see if they were currently experiencing authentication issues. Nope, nothing on the foums; technical support, realm forums or otherwise.
After we exhausted just about all of the possible causes, I thought oh no… maybe she’s been hacked! It seemed like a far-fetched possibility because why would anyone want to hack my wife’s account..? She’s about as casual as it gets. She’s not decked out in T9 or sitting on 100K gold. Hmmm…
Well, apparently there’s really no rhyme or reason behind the hacking. It just boils down to whose accounts are vulnerable. Perhaps some people get targeted specifically, but in my wife’s case, it was pure luck.
The reason I say “luck”, is because she is our guild’s banker.
My wife was finally able to log on after completing a password reset through Battle.net. The first thing she did was open up her bags. Empty… completely empty except for her mining pick and hearthstone. Next she went to her bank. Cleaned out. Totally.
It was at this time that both of us had that sinking feeling that her inventory was the least of our worries. Sure enough… the Guild Vault had been raped. Our stacks and stacks of Abyss Crystals, Ulduar BoE epics, countless blues, flasks, etc… all gone.
MOTHERF**KERS!!!
Apparently the hacking swine logged on in the wee morning hours, which would have been been 2:30am-3:30am for my wife and I. I’ve been known to stick it out that late once in awhile if I’m trying to finish up a dungeon or a raid boss, but not this night. We were both catching Zzzz’s when the criminals performed their dastardly deeds.
A handful of members were on at the time this all went down. One person who happened to be on while it happened gave us a brief description of the crime…
Apart from my wife actually being on at that time, the first thing that seemed unusual was that my wife’s banker toon quit the guild. Next, the criminal began logging into all of her characters. Immediately after that, they began inviting anonymous toons into the guild.
It was at this time that someone checked the guild bank to see that it was being pilfered. My wife’s main was draining the guild dry and there was nothing anyone could do about it, because the only one with the power to /gkick was offline and fast asleep.
To add insult to injury, while they were cleaning out our guild bank, the hooligan typed into guild chat, “Lucky day, eh..!”
Grrrrr…
Knowing that something was awry, a couple of the guild members had quickly submitted tickets once they suspected foul play. Blizzard responded by resetting my wife’s password in an attempt to put an immediate halt to the sabotage. Unfortunately, it was too little too late.
Blizzard responded to her ticket stating that the guild items should be retrievable, and will be returned to our GM via the mail system within several days. However, they gave her no guarantees when it came to her personal items.
Brutal.
Needless to say, after she was done getting the in-game matter sorted out, I ran an anti-spyware program on her PC to try and sniff out the culprit. Sure enough, there was a piece of malware in her registry which I quickly disposed of.
Her password’s changed and the malware gone… let’s just hope that she gets her items back. She lost a ton of enchanting mats, along with a countless number of other untold riches.
They even messed with her action bar skills!!! Can you believe these a$$holes..?! I really hope Blizzard is able to trace the activity back to these MF’ers and deal with them accordingly.
I went and changed my password too, just because I think it’s a good preventative measure to take every several months anyway.
I tell ya… times like these make me even more grateful that I use a Mac.
By the way… for anyone who’s curious, the name of the file that I turned up was: Adware.MyWebSearch. It was located in the windows registry and seems to have a lot of controversy attached to it if you’re to search for it in Google. Most of the information out there concerning this bit of software indicates that it’s something you should delete if found by a MalWare program. The one I used to detect it was Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware 1.40.
Hope this helps some of you. 
