Account hacks - Before & After

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Gmfirst
A3 Gamemaster
Posts: 1063
Joined: Mon Jun 13, 2005 11:41 pm
Class: Archer
Town: Temoz

Account hacks - Before & After

Post by Gmfirst »

Everybody in A3 India debates about Account hacks and hackers in the game. There are many rumours and few truths about this whole issue floating around the game and the forum not to leave out the minds of all A3 Users. I will try and break down the facts in the following article.

How does your account get hacked?


1. You share your ID with your friend online which can be for a variety of reasons ranging from trying out another character to as small as feeding your pet when you are out travelling. The friend or some one from his environment chooses to hack your account for his personal benefits.

2. You play from a cafe which is unprotected which in turn breaks down to
- presence of keyloggers and other trojans
- presence of players around you trying to peek at you typing your password.
- Admins who are totally un responsive to the presence of such elements.

3. You bought an account from another player for real cash (not supported by us yet it is practised by some) and a few days later your account was hacked.

4. A serious vulnerability in the forum or server leading to the hack of your account.

I will discuss the flow path the first 3 situations. The fourth will be dealt with at the end of article.

What happens then?

All the above mentioned forms of hacks are notified to us by a mail to [email protected].

The key indicators in this communication are

1. We encourage only the original owner of the account to communicate with us. Any other friend/cafemate/KH mate mailing us will be ignored.

2. This has to be at the earliest. The current timeframe to report an account hack is 48 hrs to request Account & Item Retrieval. Upto One week is allowed for Account retrieval. Anything past this is considered belated and will not be considered by the support team.

3. Key game information about your character will be required by the support team. Let me explain this in detail here.
When you contact us saying your account is hacked your credentials are as follows
- You give us only your account id
- Your profile information might have been changed by hacker and hence it is hardly sufficient to be correct.
- You do not use your alternate email ID mentioned in the profile. Even if you did it might have been changed in the profile by hacker. It is advisable to use the same email id for all interactions with us at anytime.
It is obvious that from the above information it is absoultely impossilbe to differentiate a false claim from a legitimate one. Hence we ask for key game information which we feel is known only to the user and no one else. Some of them are very deep questions and you may not be able to answer them accurately. In such a case we advise you to make an attempt and provide approximate information atleast.


I did all that. When do i get my account?

Account Retrieval:
If you provide the information correctly then getting your account back is only a matter of time which is not more than 48 hrs from the time you provide all the information to the support team.

Item Retrieval:

Items that have not been destroyed alone will be retrieved.
This is effective only
--->If the hack is reported within 48 hrs of the hack by mail to the support team.
--->If it is the first time the account has been hacked due to any of the first 3 methods of account hack mentioned at the beginning of this article.

By now another big question must have popped up in your mind. What are items that are not destroyed. Though i cannot explicitly tell you what it is for the simple reason of preventing hackers from doing ir-repearable damage to accounts, I will attempt to give you an understanding of this.

Items that are not liquidated into the system beyond reversal are termed destroyed items. NPC'ed items are not necessarily destroyed items.

What if your game server or web server caused my account hack?

We as a game publisher strive to provide the utmost security to your account information yet we or any other service provider for that matter cannot guarantee against such an attack. Our game servers are virtually inaccessible to any hackers. We have a track record of 100 % security there. However on the web server end 100 % is not a realistic figure to even think of achieving. Each day new updates, new vulnerabilities are thrown onto the net to crack web based services. We had our biggest security issue with the forum vulnerability. Also the billing system issue which caused a huge mess last christmas. We did a complete recovery for all the affected accounts.


How can i be sure it is not your fault?

First ask yourselves if you are strictly not possible to come under the first 3 categories. If you are convinced that you are not let us know. We will take it with utmost seriousness and check for any loop holes. In effect if none are found with our servers and you are still not convinced that there is such a vulenerablity, the responsibility to prove the same relies with you to expect a full item retrieval using the fourth clause of Account hack.


This system has been greatly modified from the day it was put out for users and will continue to change only to improve our quality of service to you. All informations or process details are those that active on date and may not be applicabe to some of the old account hack issues or retrievals.
Regards,
[GM]First
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