- Do you think most of the cases are just people being careless with their passwords and/or getting keylogged?
Well, it's an online game with 6 million players. I doubt many people would think "yeah, I'll make my password something really obscure and difficult to remember just for Diablo 3". I think most people would choose something fairly benign like "diablo3" or "diablo3password". What I did think is that they're being brute-forced, given Blizzard have no protection against that. It'd be really easy to set up a machine that runs through logins (how they're getting logins is another question) and tries to guess the password. It could also explain why their servers are going offline every once in a while - hackers have hundreds of machines running all trying to login into accounts by basically just guessing the password repeatedly.
The fact that passwords aren't case sensitive makes this infinitely easier on a mind-bogglingly large scale though. Because all of a sudden "password", "passWord", "paSSworD" and 256 other variants can all be checked with just the one "password" attempt. If the password was something more than a fairly simple word though (or something other than a known
common password), that becomes a bit harder and more time consuming to crack.
So yeah, I had thought that perhaps the people getting hacked had fairly simple passwords that had just been brute-forced (think of someone trying to login to your account and just running through all the guesses they can possibly come up with, only they're doing it with a computer and they can check over 3,000 passwords an hour). The other thought was that there was some popular mod or crack people had downloaded which unwittingly does capture and send your account details to a hacker in China / wherever.
The only thing is, I'd assume a bunch of IPs trying to brute-force their way in would surely show up in Blizzard's logs and that they'd do something about that - though given their lack of security that's an assumption I'm not too certain I could make. And if it was a popular program, I'd have thought that surely someone would've done their own checks on them and actually confirmed a keylogger or some such in it by now... And surely if someone had an infection that got caught, they would've said so by now. I mean the people that are coming up as getting hacked aren't exactly idiots (at least, I wouldn't think all of them are). We're talking about at least two "semi-prominent" game journalists that have been pinged now. Someone near them surely knows how to use a computer and would've looked for a virus / something on it. I've even seen YouTube videos which surely must be some clued in guys watching their own characters get hacked right before their eyes.
And let's face it, if all these people have keyloggers on their computers, then how come hackers are stealing their Diablo 3 Gold and not their real cash, in their real bank account? ... or their WoW character? ... or their SC2 details? This is a VERY specific and targeted hack.
Another interesting thing is that it seems only accounts with high level gear are being targeted (40+). From what I can tell, low level accounts with shitty gear aren't even being touched. So, how are they being found? How do the hackers know they have stuff worth stealing? Is it a weakness in the auction house - that these players have tried to sell something, which has therefore made them a target? Have these players downloaded some sort of map-hack tool or tried to purchase equipment from somewhere? But again, that assumes they're
all idiots and I just don't believe that.
No, I actually think more and more that there is a very major weakness in Blizzard's security system (let's face it, Sony and I think XBox have both been hacked through some fairly herp-a-derp weaknesses) that allows someone, once they have a target, to select an account, break into it and do whatever they like to it.
Oh yeah, as for Blizzard's denials, here's a nice comparison I found on the D3 forums:
Trion made a similar post last year about Rift:
http://forums.riftgame.com/rift-gen...iscussion/109922-protecting-your-account.html
They too claimed that at least 80% of the hacked accounts were the result of keyloggers. That is, until it was announced that their account DB had been hacked.
http://www.1up.com/news/rift-account-database-hacked
.
Wow, just wow.
Looks like Blizzard are tracking some Chinese IP's though, so I'd guess this is the work of some Chinese Gold farmers who got a little bit too eager and probably jumped the gun early... or are hoping to cash in early and sell items and accounts through ebay and such.
