Tuesday, April 28, 2009

I WAS KEY LOGGED!!!!


Yep, it finally happened. I was key logged last week. I found out from an e-mail I received from Blizzard, the company that runs World of Warcraft. The e-mail stated I had attempted too many password recall attempts. Strange . . . I haven't played WoW in a couple of weeks. I immediately logged onto WoW, and to my horror, most of my characters had been stripped naked. Their gold was gone and they were relieved of all their items from mail, bags, and banks. I was so pissed! I immediately contacted a GM in game. While I waited for their return e-mail, I immediately changed every password for every program and website I could think of, even my banking. I also researched what I could do to prevent this again. I made a document containing all my passwords so I could just cut and paste instead of actually keying in my passwords.

Blizzard sent me e-mails acknowledging my plight and I waited for them to finish researching the matter. In a few days, I was happy to see that all my items and gold had been returned to my characters. I have to tell you, I was very depressed. I felt very violated. After all, these are my babies! I worked very hard and long to get my characters where they are today.

Just as I thought the whole nightmare was over, a few days after the Blizzard ordeal, I received e-mail from eBay. Apparently, I listed a professional version of Microsoft Office for $89. Wait just a second! I did no such thing. So, I started freaking out. I immediately checked my account. Nothing was amiss other than this listing. I then received an e-mail from eBay stating that the listing had been removed due to copyright policies. Good! I didn't want a bad mark again me because someone else was scamming. But what about my eBay reputation? I received another e-mail stating that I had been a victim of an unauthorized third party and they were taking steps to secure my account. I was happy to see their quick response. I wasn't quite sure how this person was going to benefit from what they were doing as I was able to get into my account and my PayPal account had not been compromised either. However, it was resolved.

So, how did I get into this predicament? I am a downloading monkey. My husband says I will download anything and he is right. But no more! If I do not know the site and do not trust it, I will not download. I actually did a deep virus scan with Antivir and also scanned using Spybot and Malwarebyte. Malwarebyte found three worms and a Trojan. All came from fronts I downloaded off of a site the week before all this happened. Lesson learned!

My husband also told me about a neat program called TCPView. It enables you to monitor what ports are opening up going into your computer and from where. It doesn't alert you of any malicious intent, but if you see I site listed you don't recognize, you can immediately pull the plug on your computer and thwart the commie bastards!

I have also switched from Yahoo Messenger, which is not very secure, to Trillian.

I have certainly learned a lot from this experience. Don't be a download monkey like me.

1 comment:

  1. Wow,that is freaky! I'm glad that everything turned out fine.

    ReplyDelete