Interview with a hacker

Account security is an important detail to pay attention to, just ask the numerous people who have had their World of Warcraft accounts hacked, accessed, and taken advantage of. Even I had my account hacked once. I still do not know how it happened, I never go to websites that I am unsure about, and I have a solid anti-virus program. I have never entered my account details on a website other than worldofwarcraft.com. Yet one day it happened, August 10th, 2009. I woke up that morning with an email from Blizzard saying that my account had been compromised and was locked until I could email them and verify that I had secured my account. I went through a gauntlet of emotions from anger to feeling violated. It took three days to get my account back, and I feared the worst, my characters would be deleted, everything gone… I was actually lucky.

The person who hacked my account only created some characters on other realms and used them to spam chat channels. I deleted the new characters and went on with my game. I also went straight to the blizzard store (http://www.blizzard.com/store) and bought an account authenticator. 

The reason I bring this up, is someone close to me had their account hacked the other day. I was first notified about this from a player telling me that someone in my guild was acting really weird. The person telling me this invited me to where my guildmate's character was and showed me how he was using an exploit to mine ore. I watched it with my own eyes, and I knew right away that my guildie's account had been compromised. I tried to talk to my guildy hoping that it was not so, but as you can guess, the hacker didn't respond. Then after being ignored, I threatened the hacker that I was going to report him. I asked him to give me an interview, he granted it on the condition that if he let me interview him, that I would cancel my ticket with the GM’s, and I agreed. 

The interview took place on the game and then over IM’s later. I asked him a wide variety of questions trying to figure out the how and why of him hacking my guild members account. Not that I thought I could do anything about it, I knew Blizzard themselves rarely did anything to the IP addresses that were used to hack people’s accounts, I was just curious.

The hacker claimed to be an American, though I have my doubts with his broken English. He claims that he did not hack the account himself and that he buys hacked accounts from people he knows. He told me most hacked accounts sold anywhere from $5 to $100 depending on the contents of the hacked account. When asked how he first found out how to do this, he told me a friend introduced him to it. 

Did he work freelance or did he work for a company? He told me that he worked alone and sold the gold he made to gold selling websites. The only company he named in specific was IGE, which did not surprise me. I asked him if the companies that bought the gold from him knew how he acquired it, that he was hacking accounts and not actually farming the gold himself and he told me that they had a good idea.

He claimed to be a 31 year old male, who only does this because he is broke and he needs money. He even went as far to say that he once wrote a letter to Blizzard telling them how to prevent people’s accounts from being hacked and they ignored him. I asked him to provide me a copy of this letter and he said he would try to find it and email it to me, but never did. He even told me that he knew what he was doing was wrong, that he hates hackers who do this, but he needed money so bad that was why he was doing it.

The biggest thing I take from this is, I know for fact he had access to my guild members account. How he acquired it, is unclear as he may have been lying to me. But the fact that he was using my friends account to mine ore shows me that it was not the simple "hack and strip" everything them move on like we see often. This person was trying to earn as much as he could while he could. Also that he told me he was selling the gold to the companies like IGE has me quite interested. As IGE is a major powerhouse in the area of World of Warcraft. 

IGE owns Thottbot.com and Wowhead.com to name a few. IGE is also one of the largest gold selling companies on the internet. 

So if you’re buying gold, then there is good chances you’re supporting someones account being hacked. How else do you think they get the gold they are selling you? Even if the company is “Reputable” and do not hack your account, they are still tied to people getting their account hacked. Next time you want to buy gold think about that.

I have contacted IGE for an interview where I will see what they say about the hacker’s claims and should have an article about that in the future.