I just thought it might be a good idea to throw up a quick warning for all of our visitors who are enjoying Diablo 3 right now. Hackers are draining loot and equipment from players like Shelob sucking the fluids from a tasty hobbit.
While these things are often rumour and speculation, this one looks pretty real. Christian Donlan of Eurogamer reports on his friends account being hacked and how he talked with the hacker online before reporting them:
Eurogamer talks to a Diablo 3 hacker
Although reports are varied on whether it is an effective defence, make sure you use the Blizzard validator when logging in.
From the Blizzard forums, one user suggests the following:
How to know if your session is hijacked:
You will lose connection to the game. This can result in just the ‘Lost connection to server’ error message or no message at all. A good sign that the connection loss is a hijack attempt and not just a server error is if you are also having trouble surfing the web (i.e. slow connections, or can’t load pages). People are reporting that their IP is getting DDOSed to prevent them from relogging into Diablo 3 and thus getting a new session and stopping the attack.
What to do if your session is hijacked:
The best thing to do is to try and reconnect to Diablo 3 ASAP. As said before, some people are reporting being DDOSed after the hijack. This is because the hackers want to prevent you from relogging into your account until they transfer all your gold and items. So you should do these steps:
1. Reboot your modem to get a new IP address.
2. Relogin to Diablo 3 ASAP once your connection is re-established.
3. Remove any friends from your friends list that you have not added.
4. Repeat if necessary.
Of course this brings up larger issues of Blizzard’s inability to launch a game smoothly, which they have stated is to ensure the security of their system before that same system is compromised within days of release. We are working on our Diablo 3 review at the moment but want to make sure we experience every aspect of the game and complete the campaign. Obviously this has been difficult to do.
For the moment our advice would be to stay out of public games, only play with verified friends and use the validator. Obviously an offline mode would be the safest way to play right now, but you know…….
Funny appendum:
On the Eurogamer comments, user organica said:
“This effectively means you can get your ‘single player’ Diablo 3 game hacked, looted and sold on/discarded – yes?”
To which user the_dudefather replied:
“Like this is anything new, one time when I was playing Ocarina of time, some punk jumped in through the window, slapped a memory card into the N64 controller, stole all my milk bottles with fairies in them and sold my save game to some Chinese rupee farmer”