I just got an email notifying me that I changed my contact Email address. So I tried to log in, password/username incorrect. Tried to submit a ticket. . . but you have to log in to do so which I no longer can do -_-;; Sooooooo. . . . I dunno. I guess I'll try calling tomorrow but I was sorta done with the game anyway, this is just the fork that's telling me it's done.

I'll try to recover my account because I want access to my blizzard games but really, I don't play em anymore. That being said, this is pretty bullshit. I guess I should just be thankful that I tend to use different passwords for all my online services so the jackasses can't get access to anything else. I hope I didn't have my credit card information in their system anywhere. Blizzard has been pretty cool up till now, but this kinda shit is just awful. Thought I'd just add my story to the online consciousness that people should prolly change their passwords when companies tell you "hey dude, our shit got hacked."

There was a news story about this a few days ago.

Blizzard should get themselves some kind of authenticator.

I suggest scrubbing your PC for keyloggers and whatnot. Always good to be sure.

@Selftest said:

There was a news story about this a few days ago.

Yea, but I figured I'd play the odds that they wouldn't get my shit. They got my shit. -_-;;

@adam1808 said:

Blizzard should get themselves some kind of authenticator.

Yea they have an authenticator but I don't wanna use it because it's a hassle. Up until now, I haven't had any issues nor do I have any hot items that I'm afraid hackers are gonna sell on my account since I don't play WoW. I guess I had some stuff on Diablo III but again, I don't tend to play to late game so none of it was worth anything. Dunno. . . I don't use a second layer of protection on any of my other online accounts so I felt it a bit much to do it for a game.

@Zomgfruitbunnies said:

I suggest scrubbing your PC for keyloggers and whatnot. Always good to be sure.

Yea, just in case I'll go ahead and run antimalaware and spybot.

Really, I shoulda just changed my password after they announced they were hacked, but I was lazy. I'm throwing this up in hopes that other lazy people like me go ahead and change their password so they don't have to deal with this crap.

@Fobwashed: Sorry I knew that, I was just being glib. My sympathies anyway, I don't play Blizzard games but having to think twice before entering your information sucks at the best of times.

@Fobwashed: It feels a bit much cause nothing else uses it at first, but Blizzard accounts are just so sought after that it's justified. I mean, considering the amount of spam i get which are just phishing scams for Blizzard games...

That sucks man. I played the odds and didn't change my stuff until yesterday, but then I changed my passwords for EVERYTHING.

It feels like everything has been hacked into in the past two months so I just decided to go for it.

I don't see why it's so hard for authentication a la Steam. So long as your email is locked down it's pretty hard to hijack a Steam account. Also 2-step authenticate your Gmail everyone, it's no hassle at all.

not to rub salt in the wound but you should have bought an authenticator. you can log in somehow just really cant remember since its extremly complicated. blizzard saw some suspicious activity on my account to they change my password or something like that so i could not log in and i had to log in to do anything. and i had allready waited 2 weeks on my authenticator and it would not arrive for another 2 weeks.i did not call them i did something else. if i remember ill write you.

oh and sorry man that really sux

@Fobwashed: You should be able to get your account back.

E-mail them and explain the situation, they'll ask for some sort of ID verification. Either a picture of your ID (they should keep logs of your contact info even if it was changed), or a picture of your cd-key if you bought a retail box. Shouldn't be much harder than that, though it might take a few days.

@adam1808 said:

@Fobwashed: Sorry I knew that, I was just being glib. My sympathies anyway, I don't play Blizzard games but having to think twice before entering your information sucks at the best of times.

No prob, didn't take any offense =)

@Shirogane said:

@Fobwashed: It feels a bit much cause nothing else uses it at first, but Blizzard accounts are just so sought after that it's justified. I mean, considering the amount of spam i get which are just phishing scams for Blizzard games...

Games wise, yea, I've noticed more blizzard phishing scams more than any others. I blame WoW for this -_-;;

@ReyGitano said:

That sucks man. I played the odds and didn't change my stuff until yesterday, but then I changed my passwords for EVERYTHING.

It feels like everything has been hacked into in the past two months so I just decided to go for it.

Went ahead and swapped out my important pws (credit cards, bank accounts) but just left my other email/game related ones alone. All my passwords for the most part are different so if one gets hacked, there's no real connection to any other. At least I've got that going for me =P

@Loafsmooch said:

@Fobwashed: You should be able to get your account back.

E-mail them and explain the situation, they'll ask for some sort of ID verification. Either a picture of your ID (they should keep logs of your contact info even if it was changed), or a picture of your cd-key if you bought a retail box. Shouldn't be much harder than that, though it might take a few days.

I plan on calling their service center tomorrow when they're open and if that doesn't work, I'll try the email route. The websites are effed because at every turn, they want you to log in to retrieve or reset your password and I think the email address associated w/my account has been changed at this point. So I have neither the email or the password. You'd think if this were a pretty common problem, they'd have some kind of online set up to deal with accounts who've had their email altered in addition to pw.

Just an update. I've been calling support since this morning and their support queue is full so I can't even get on hold for the next representative *face palm*

I'll prolly keep trying sporadically throughout the day.

@Alexander said:

I don't see why it's so hard for authentication a la Steam. So long as your email is locked down it's pretty hard to hijack a Steam account. Also 2-step authenticate your Gmail everyone, it's no hassle at all.

I'm going to be honest, I didn't know (but probably should have) that Gmail had 2-step authentication. I'm totally setting this up when I get home, thanks!

@Fobwashed said:

Just an update. I've been calling support since this morning and their support queue is full so I can't even get on hold for the next representative *face palm*

I'll prolly keep trying sporadically throughout the day.

If you don't stay in the queue it's gonna take longer.

Are you logged into the forums or still able too? Sometimes with certain browsers you stay logged in when you save cookies. If you are able to access the forums you can start a new thread in the proper help forum and get help super quick. Fortunately for me, I use several Bnet accounts and am able to switch to another account to use the forums. Which are monitored by GMs round the clock. Just a thought.

Also, the physical authenticators are still the best ways of protection. If you still want to play those games.

I wonder how many inactive accounts were hacked and how many people are going to have problems coming back to WoW. Next month with the release of MoP.

Another weird work-around that MIGHT work. Is you could create a trial account. Log in and open a GM ticket. Be sure to use keywords like "Hacked". I've done this with other issues, but not when I was hacked.

Don't know if you use WoW or not. But if you do your items/gear will be gone. You will have to open a in-game ticket, email or go to the help forums to get your stuff recovered. Just a warning that this stuff takes time. Which is why getting a solid authenticator is a great idea! Items in D3 will be gone too.

@Silvergun said:

@Alexander said:

I don't see why it's so hard for authentication a la Steam. So long as your email is locked down it's pretty hard to hijack a Steam account. Also 2-step authenticate your Gmail everyone, it's no hassle at all.

I'm going to be honest, I didn't know (but probably should have) that Gmail had 2-step authentication. I'm totally setting this up when I get home, thanks!

I held off for a long time because I thought I'd be relying on my mobile always working, but you can even print out 1-time use codes to be used when signing in, say you're on holiday and don't have data or network coverage. What did it for me was reading about the horror story for Wired's Mat Honan. It's well worth a read but to summarise the hackers knew his Gmail because it was on his personal site, figured out his secondary email (or recovery email) because it showed *****@me.com and the number of characters matched his Gmail, they knew it was an Apple ID with it being @me.com, got into that email address by adding a credit card to his Amazon, getting the last 4 digits on his existing credit card, using that in conjunction with his home address they got by looking up his personal website to call Apple, pretending they were him (at the time that's all you needed to get access to an Apple account). They reset his Gmail, got access to that, wiped out his Mac, iPhone and iPad because he had that reset service enabled in iCloud. They then deleted his Google Account. They did all this just to get his Twitter.

All this wouldn't have happened if he had 2-step authentication. Of course he was targeted, and you or I are less likely to be targeted but better safe than sorry.

@SoothsayerGB: Thanks for the info. If I can't get someone on the phone today, I'll most likely try what you're suggesting. Also, it's not that I'm choosing not to stay in the queue, it's that the queue is full and they aren't taking any more people =( If it were a matter of waiting to get a hold of someone, I'd do it.

I really just don't want to jump through that extra hoop to play what little of the blizzard games I play. I could understand use of the authenticator if I were playing WoW and had a bunch of shit I really cared about but as it stands, I don't play anything anymore but I also don't want to not have access to my games which is why I'm going through this process. I haven't touched SC2 since a month or so after its release and I only rarely log into Diablo 3 to do a quest or two with a new character maybe once a week. Honestly, if I'm not giving out my PW, and it's complex enough that it'd be terribly hard to brute force it (it's a 16 character with varied upper/lower case and numbers), blizzard would have to be hacked for me to be in trouble. . . which they were =( Hell, if there were anything I'd want an autheticator for, it'd be Steam since that's where all the PC games I play exist and so far, I haven't had any issues with them. Balls! Balls I say!

Btw, been trying a call every say half hour since 7 and the queue is still full. I'm guessing a whole lotta people got hacked =\

@Fobwashed: Well that sucks duder. Unfortunately this is the world we live in now. Constantly having to monitor every account you own and changing passwords for things left and right. At least you were smart and had a separate password from other services.

@Alexander said:

@Silvergun said:

@Alexander said:

I don't see why it's so hard for authentication a la Steam. So long as your email is locked down it's pretty hard to hijack a Steam account. Also 2-step authenticate your Gmail everyone, it's no hassle at all.

I'm going to be honest, I didn't know (but probably should have) that Gmail had 2-step authentication. I'm totally setting this up when I get home, thanks!

I held off for a long time because I thought I'd be relying on my mobile always working, but you can even print out 1-time use codes to be used when signing in, say you're on holiday and don't have data or network coverage. What did it for me was reading about the horror story for Wired's Mat Honan. It's well worth a read but to summarise the hackers knew his Gmail because it was on his personal site, figured out his secondary email (or recovery email) because it showed *****@me.com and the number of characters matched his Gmail, they knew it was an Apple ID with it being @me.com, got into that email address by adding a credit card to his Amazon, getting the last 4 digits on his existing credit card, using that in conjunction with his home address they got by looking up his personal website to call Apple, pretending they were him (at the time that's all you needed to get access to an Apple account). They reset his Gmail, got access to that, wiped out his Mac, iPhone and iPad because he had that reset service enabled in iCloud. They then deleted his Google Account. They did all this just to get his Twitter.

All this wouldn't have happened if he had 2-step authentication. Of course he was targeted, and you or I are less likely to be targeted but better safe than sorry.

Yeah, I'd heard that story, and I have a friend who got his Gmail hacked and it was a miserable experience for him. Also, I know with my WoW account, I had an authenticator and never had an issue. Then, when I got a new phone, I had it removed but didn't get a new one put on until the next day. In that less than 24 hour span of not having one on, I got hacked. After getting things restored, I put a new one on and haven't had an issue since. This has made me a big fan of authenticators.

Meanwhile my authenticator lets me sleep soundly at night. Unfortunately I don't care all that much about Blizzard games. However, it was a good investment for back when I did. It was only a few dollars if I remember correctly. Just press a button, generate a six digit code, type it in and voila. Takes no more than 10 seconds and you don't have to worry about nonsense like this.

Okay. So I got my account back as I got through to the support phone lines. The wait was around 20 min and then it took maybe 10 min to clear things up.

I logged back into Diablo 3 expecting all my characters to have been deleted but something else happened during the half day I didn't have control of my account. I think someone was actually playing the game. My friends list is barren except for 2 new people that I may try to contact later on. In addition to that, while all my low level characters were pretty much untouched, my lvl 60 barbarian is wearing a completely different set of gear than he had on him when I last played him. I THINK it's better than what I had considering the gear I had before was pretty much Hell difficulty stuff while I was in Inferno.

Also, I had around 100k gold last I logged in and now I have well over 2 million. My friend told me that 2 mil is not much, but it's a hell of a lot more than what I had before. So I guess, aside from being locked out of my account and having to deal with the shit of getting it back, my Diablo 3 account came out ahead somehow. Freaking weird.

they're free.

@Grillbar said:

not to rub salt in the wound but you should have bought an authenticator.