Hacking

I been hacked. It's a strange feeling, kinda like being violated but it's probably worse than that because I don't know how far the hacking has gone. I know they've managed to get one username and password combination which means more have probably slipped out but I haven't seen any signs of that yet.

So what's actually happened ? Had a peek over at Evemon yesterday, it's a tool that monitors your Eve online characters while you're not actually in the game. Instead of the millions my character should have, it was reporting less than 1 million ... Question - is Evemon glitching again ? So I check it out in game, to find that my in game cash has been transferred away and a decent number of my ships have been sold.

It's not much fun playing Internet Spaceship Game if you have no ships to play with.

I've gone through the routine of scanning the machine, changing passwords, complaining to the people who run Eve. No joy yet, although I expect the Eve people are all off on weekends so I haven't expected to see much. Another wrinkle is that I've now cancelled the Eve account but because yesterday was the last day of the subscription, I can't track the progress of the complaint. Grr. Don't think I'll be back in Eve.

My other online stuff all looks to be fine but I've changed passwords to be sure. I came up with another fun one last night while trying to get to sleep. This one looks to have been a fairly well targeted attack, with only Eve being affected. My biggest suspicion is that a trojan was present on the out-of-the-box install of my new laptop, a couple of online forums concur with this.

Someone at work got an account hacked just before Xmas too (not Eve), I know she was upset about it as well. It's strange - when you realise you've been hacked you feel violated. It kicks in the paranoia because you don't know how far the attack has gone or how much information they've stolen. It's just occurring to me now that I should contact one of the credit card companies because one of my cards may have been compromised.

So there's the "how much has been compromised" paranoia, as well as "how did they get the username and password ?"

Hacking is something that is supposed to happen to other people ;-)

I hope I do see something back from the Eve people, as it'll mean they take each one of their customers seriously and value them in a way Blizzard have forgotten to. Mind you, saying that Blizzard are usually extremely good at getting hacked Warcraft characters back to how they should be. If anything, the Eve people should be very hot on it, they have far fewer people playing their game.

We shall see !

Last word on the hacking - if you have the slightest suspicion that something Nastie has gotten into your machine, try running MBAM. That stands for Malware Bytes Anti-Malware and it's one of the better tools out there for cleaning up any mess that's gotten through your security software. I'm still in a 60 day Trial period for McAfee, let's just say that when the trial expires McAfee will be removed from the machine never to return. (I'm waiting because that's when my Kaspersky licences run out and I'll update them all as a trio)

In the meantime, I'm chilling out in front of the cricket when I should have been 3.5 hours into an 8 hour roleplay game session. However, I didn't get any information on where I was supposed to go so I've not made the trip. I think the gamers tried to get me down there but attempting to pass on the information on the day is not really good enough, hence my mobile currently being OFF. We had a fiasco a couple of months ago where Plan A was to go to Place S, then we changed to go to Place P before finally heading to Place D. I've got no intention of repeating that ... especially as I think the other guys forget that I'm the only one who travels a decent distance.

So - downer post today, which is something I hate to have at the top of the blog. I'll knock it off tomorrow with something more about the technology stuff :-) But for today, I'm reflecting a crappy mood that needed an outlet. Pizza may be required tonight.