Hacker scare

My guild in World of Warcraft has been hit hard by a number of people who got their accounts hacked in the last few days. Luckily the damage was pretty minor, only one person has had his main character deleted and even then Blizzard managed to bring back the character after only a few days.

But still… The part that worried me most was the fact that the people who got hacked weren't your typical "getting hacked" victims. They don't share their account with their friends, don't play from internet cafés or install a lot of strange stuff. No, these guys are the serious raider type who take pride in their character and their account, always on the top of their game during raids etc. If you were to ask me last week to pick 5 people in the guild who I think would never get hacked, some of the guys that did get hacked would've made that list.

Now I know it's only a game, but when you risk to lose everything you have accumulated over the last couple of months or even years… Scary.

As a result, I'm getting more and more paranoid about links on games site and I more regularly check to see if my firewall and anti-virus software is up to date. Our guild has also started to collect phone numbers of people so we can warn the victims if a hack is in progress. But since all of these hacks have occured in the middle of the night, and since a lot of our members have families, I wonder how they're going to react if they get called in the middle of the night because of a game.