If your character in Diablo 3 just happens to lose all of its fantastic armor and/or gold, then you might have been a victim of a hack. Eurogamer is reporting that one of its own, writer Christian Donlan, had his account hacked and then hijacked by someone else. The rash of account hacking is apparently spreading, with multiple sources and players reporting that their gold and items are being taken from their accounts. Blizzard has taken note of the issue, and have been rolling back accounts to recover some of the items and gold taken from players, but the issue still persists.
One probable cause of all the determined hacking is the real-money auction house feature of Diablo 3, where players can buy and sell equipment with real life money. Hackers have apparently seen the possible benefits of compromising other people’s accounts with the lure of creating real cash from virtual items.
Eurogamer gives potential reasons how the accounts may have been hacked. “The reports coincided with the EU Diablo 3 servers going offline on Sunday afternoon for around four hours, preventing players from logging in (error 33). It has been suggested that the EU servers were taken offline following a SQL injection attack, but this remains unconfirmed,” they said. “One theory suggested by players on the Battle.net forum revolves around hijacking session identifiers, which would allow hackers to take over accounts without alerting Blizzard’s authentication server. Again, this remains unconfirmed.”
We advise players to be extremely vigilant when playing. Standard account protection rules apply if you don’t want your stuff to get stolen.
Source: Eurogamer