Honor's Code

I've gotten 3 emails during the past week about an Account Investigation into my account. It took me about 3 nanoseconds to figure out they were phishing emails designed to steal my account information. No way, Jose. I was born at night, but not last night. Never click a link in an email sent to you. To use a real world example, my wife and I are planning a vacation to a well known amusement park this summer. We got an offer from said amusement park. But did I click on the link? No way, I have Divine Intellect in my build, fo'shizzle. I went to said companies website and found the offer there. You just can't be too careful these days. Of course what's really funny about the WoW phishing email is that they've sent all 3 to my honorshammer gmail account. Well my Warcraft account isn't tied to that email. As far as I know, Blizzard account services doesn't even know nor care it exists. I have a completely different and unpublished email attached to my Blizzard ...

So I was reading a post over at Big Red Kitty called " You Know We Are At War ". Buried in the comments was this little jewel: "When you download your addon (and these are almost entirely from addons) take a moment before installing them to examine them. What, you use an autoinstaller? No, or at least not any more unless you’re willing and able to do the checks in the addons folders before running. (yes, I love Aces autoinstaller. I do manual checking.) Anyway, examine them before you load WoW if not before you install. Safe files are those that end in nothing, toc, lua, and txt. Unfortunately all the addons have to have an xml as well so regretfully we have to allow that too. Now anything else is to be treated with caution - but not automatic rejection. For example Auctioneer has an mp3 file, and cycircled (along with most other addons that do visual changes) uses tga files. If it’s an exe, com, bat, jpg, scr, html, or any other ‘executable’ file extension, stop. Del...

(If you get this in a reader, sorry about the early / aborted post) Wednesday night I went ahead and wiped the hard drive on my computer, and reinstalled Windows and WoW along with my security software. I never successfully identified the Malware that gave my account information. That worries me greatly because I don't have any corrective action steps to identify and take that would prevent this from happening again. There are other possibilities, like my friend AoesRus' machine being the one with Malware. They could have logged into his account, found him relatively low on funds and materials and decided to move along to a more lucrative prize like Honorshammer. Other possibilities that have been suggested to me are too disturbing to think about very long like the idea that someone at my ISP is "listening in" on my connection. Even more troubling was the idea that perhaps the gold sellers have someone "on the inside" at Blizzard with access to account infor...

I've run just about everything I can at my computer. I've tried several free or time limited Virus Scanners, Trojan Removers, Ad scanners, Spyware Scanners. They all found nothing that would point to a culprit. I've even put a HiJackThis log on BleepingComputer.com. They take at least a week for their volunteers to get back to you. I can't wait that long. So what to do? I'm going to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows and Warcraft. I've backed up everything I could think of (documents, pictures, music, etc). Since I was running McAfee at the time I was hacked, I lost a bit of confidence in them. I realize it might not have been their fault, but I run their software to protect me from stuff like this, and I wasn't protected. I'm not sure if I'll go with something like a Norton or go a la carte and get a combination of AVG or Avast, ZoneAlarm, and Adware/Spybot. I don't mind spending some real money to get real protection. I'm going to...

I got quite a shock when I logged into my account last night to find my bank mule, Maersk no longer on my account. Also missing in action, was my Druid alt, Honorsclaw. I logged into Honorshammer. He was just outside of the Shadow Labs in some weird assortment of gear. ZA DPS Plate Chest, Season 2 Gloves, Teir 4 Helm and Shoulders, 2.3 Badge Pants and Boots. He had 16g to his name. In his bags were his Epic Engineering Helicopter, a Hearthstone, and 2 Super Mana Pots. I hearthed him back to Shattrah, and found an empty bank. Well not completely empty. Whoever had been in my account had left his some Obisidan Warbeads, Oshu'gun Crystal Powder, his Holy Mightstone, all of his PVP tokens (WSG, AV, AB, EotS), the Singed Page I kept from the first time I main tanked Prince into the ground, and all 201 Badges of Justice that I had been saving up. They had also abandoned everyone of Honorshammer's quests. My Hunter was out of gold, he had all his regular gear on. His bags were emptied...