I was having a fine day today until I got a PM from Fattino asking if I had ninja quit without tell anyone, because all of my expensive things were gone(Fatt has my account info). I thought he was playing a joke on me, a way to get me to log in since I hadn't since last Sunday. When I logged on, I found Arrowyn half naked, only wearing her EQ that was rare/ex. I had 0 gil, and all my valuable items were gone except for my Mary's Horn. Surely I was hacked and it wasn't a joke.. I counted up what I remembered and I'm pretty sure around 6-7 million was taken from me(luckily EQ like my head and gtk are rare/ex).
Like I said, I hadn't been on since Sunday, so it could've happened any time between Sunday-Friday.. but what was odd to me was that they took 1 of my earrings.. and left the other.. and they took my 70k neck piece, but left my 150k instrument, which leads me to believe that maybe Fattino interupted them while they were stealing some stuff.
Anyway back to the point, I don't know much about computers, but what from people have told me, there is a big chance this happened because I use a windower. Since I can't explain well why.. I'm just gonna copy Ket's post that he put somewhere else.
Ketrebu wrote:
This isn't the first time I've heard of this. I'd seen one or two stories around forums about people logging in to discover everything they had was gone. Basically someone had somehow got their password, logged into them, and transferred everything they had away. And GM's won't do a thing about it because it's not SE's fault someone got your password, and "all trades are final", as they say.
How does it happen? Key loggers are probably the common culprit, there were talks in a thread about this a while back about some ffxi site that had a built in keylogger designed just to track POL. Of course there was also that incident where some guy was taking popular "real" ffxi tools from the web, adding a trojan, and rehosting them on the web, and advertising the download.
Strictly speaking, a Key Logger trojan built for getting your POL password won't affect most people, because most people never actually type their own password in, they have it saved (and thus encrypted somewhere) and automatically log in. However, a key logger would steal a username/password if you were to type somebody elses password in! (And if it's sophisticated enough it could probably catch it when you first type it to your friend in a tell.)
Key Loggers aren't the only way of course, there could be some kind of exploit somewhere or something, but I doubt it's an exploited security flaw SE aren't aware of, you can't just "hack" into SE's servers and take passwords.
I talked to a GM about it, and he basically me was telling me {That's too bad.}. He said that "Account security is the player's responsibility, we can't reimburse any items or gil". When I asked if they could somehow figured out where my stuff was delivered to, he said "We do not have the tools to track the delivery system. As it is the player's responsibility", even though the player doesn't have control over who can enter his/her account if it is hacked.
Anyways the reason for this post is, don't use a windower if you do, and don't give your account info to
anyone. You may think it couldn't happen to you, but it very well could, because that's what I had thought before too, and it's not worth the loss. I'm still shocked that I was hacked.. it's still not sinking in. I know some of you can gain that million back easily... but I can't. I don't even have the time to gain it quickly, and I'm not sure if I want to put in all that effort again. I've spent so much effort over the past year and a half and to just have my things taken away from some ass makes me sad. I thought about quitting, and I probably would've if I wasn't going to be moving early this summer. I thought about how I'm gonna be bored and alone in my new house, and I'm going to need something like FFXI to keep me occupied.
I still got some kindred seals and bst seals, and I've gotten enough gil to travel around with. Thanks everyone who has been trying to make me feel better and has offered their help, I really appareciate it.