Week 8: Internet Security

Regarding the topic of Internet Security, I will now share my painful experience of having several of my gaming accounts hacked. Ouch.

One seemingly normal day in 2009, I was out having dinner when I received a text from my friend asking me why I didn't reply his message on World of Warcraft, the WORLD'S GREATEST MMORPG GAME. I told him I was outside and not at home playing, and he replied saying I am online on his friends list now. I was shocked and rushed home to check.

When I logged into the game, I found out to my horror that my character was naked (he had no armour on) and all his gold (the in-game currency) was gone. I had been an unfortunate victim of hacking. Somehow a hacker had got access to my password and hacked and STOLE my virtual assets. I had lost what I spent many painful hours to earn. 

What made things better was when I contacted Blizzard support (the game's developer and publisher), they were very helpful in restoring everything I had lost through the account breach. I was advised to change my password of not only my game account but my email account as well as that could possibly be how the devious hackers got hold of my game account's password in the first place. I took the extra measure by migrating my game account to another email entirely, a more secure gmail account with 2-step verification.

You may think that after this incident I would be smarter when it came to Internet security, but this next episode in my life will tell you otherwise. A new video game was launched in 2012 called Guild Wars 2. Like World of Warcraft, it too was an MMORPG a genre I love dearly. As the game was new, players were exploring a relatively unexplored world and everyone was leveling towards the level-cap of level 80. However, midway through my adventures I was suddenly logged out of my account. I had logged back in and everything seemed fine, but then I WAS LOGGED OUT AGAIN. I wondered if the servers were having problems but that was not the case. I tried logging in again but this time I received a message telling me that my password had been changed. I felt like an old enemy had reared it's stupid head again from the disgusting bush that is the "dark web".

I stupidly had used the same password and email combination that got my World of Warcraft account hacked for my Guild Wars 2 account. Because Guild Wars 2 was fairly new, it did not have an email login feature so my gmail account's 2-step verification was not utilised. I had been hacked again...and again because my Guild Wars 2's relative infancy in the gaming world, the developers took forever to restore my account to its original status and many of my hard-earned items and most of my gold (also the currency in Guild Wars 2) was not returned to me. I vowed that day to become one of the best Guild Wars 2 players in the world (or at least in Singapore) besides this incident TO PROVE TO THE HACKERS that I had not been affected by their CRIME, THAT I WON AND THEY LOST in their quest to DEFEAT me. However I had internship and National Service shortly after and those dreams of vengeance have been put on hold indefinitely.