I have never, in a million years, had a single one of my online game accounts hacked as of late. Until recently, my Trion account was compromised and I started to receive email after email about transaction failed - which confuses me, because I have valid payment information attached. I thought it was something to do with the Alpha account changing or whatever, but let me walk you all through the process I went through.

Two days ago, I put in a ticket, asking what was going on why am I getting this emails. As part of the press, game developers often give us access to alphas/betas and the such to let us cover their game for you guys and a lot times let us share keys with you guys too for being awesome fans. I’ve mentioned this type of stuff before, so I figured there was just some odd error in their account.

PLEASE NOTE IF YOU SEE THIS YOU'VE BEEN HACKED or your payment actually failed...

That was until today, two days after the ticket was open. I decided to do live chat and boy, was that a horrible experience if I ever had one. The wait time for 3 to 5 people in queue was like 10 minutes, you leave it open, and then no response, and next thing you know, someone answers, asks if you’re there, and then closes chat, opening a ticket. This creates a massive swarm of spam. If you EVER want to comment that press gets special privledges, you get zero, none, not any. You get in line with everyone else in every company, up to and including, your ticket sitting there unanswered for the longest time. 

Anyway, after an hour of trying, I got through to Trion’s live chat team and was able to talk with them. I forgot to ask their permission to repost the logs for the site, but needless to say I was given a very small amount of information: my account was compromised, they’re resetting the password, there is a large uptick of accounts compromised, for details see IGN who are apparantly the officiate of information on this incident.

Now, going to IGN and searching, I find this article with a response from Trion in regards to the account compromises, stating that it isn’t an error within their system and their security is holding strong, but hackers are using bots to farm passwords to try and buy Trion’s ArcheAge founder packs, I guess to resell for less than price.

So here we are, we’ve got TWO things to talk about. The real money trade market and Trion’s inability to properly inform their userbase that they’re currently under a major attack. Let’s start with that last one.

In Re: Trion

I love Trion and I love their games, but I don’t like it when a company sees “hundreds of millions” attempts to compromise their network and then decide meh, we’ll deal with it as it shows up. I shouldn’t have to go to some dark corner of IGN and discover oh wow so millions of attempts have been made eh. No big deal. We’ll tell people when it happens and they bother to ask.

I want more accountability from Trion about this and if you wake up one day and all the sirens are going off, let us consumers know about it. Add some information in the emails, beyond, your charge didn’t go through. I had no clue why.

Yeah, let’s fix up those emails and get some better information out there. Right now, I don’t believe my password for Trion was compromised, because it’s my “Trion only” password, so who knows. The community is on a witchhunt to figure it out, if it's really people exploiting username/passwords or what. In the live chat, I wasn't able to get much information at all, including if it was or was not a foreign hacker, and what their IP address is, even though this information was used to access my account and attempt to commit fraud against me.

Real Money Trade

We used to here at Ten Ton Hammer talk a lot about RMT, when it was a super big industry before game companies started shutting them down. Of course, they’re back, and any time you want a cheap game that retails for $150, much like a knockoff Gucci bag that looks like complete ass, they are there for you.

In other words, if you want an account Trion is going to lock you out of, go nuts.

To Everyone Else

Secure your accounts, especially with Trion. I use low-limit credit cards for online purchases that are protected against fraud and the fact they can’t charge more than a subscription or two on it. Remove your payment information for right now and readd it when you need to buy something.

Follow standard Internet safety protocols. Don’t tell people your password and don’t download bots and hacks.