Diablo III Gamers Report Account Hacks
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Official 'Diablo III' screen wallpaper.
CREDIT: Blizzard Entertainment |
Disgruntled "Diablo III" gamers have been voicing their frustration over virtual money and goods that have been mysteriously disappearing from their accounts just days after they began playing the massively popular new game.
Following the hugely anticipated May 15 release of "Diablo III," gamers began flocking to the Batle.net forum on the game developer's site, Blizzard Entertainment. Their complaints, beginning on May 19, included, "I had a heap of gems, rares and over 300k gold in my stash and now it's all gone," and "I had 900k, 10 stacks of ectos and 17 stacks of obsidian shards. Hopefully Blizzard will give those back to me."
As MSNBC reported on its In-Game blog, a player using the name Varcharten wrote, "With all the evidence we've gathered, I think it's safe to say the event was a well coordinated attack by hackers. Unless, by pure coincidence, a bug has just appeared, at the same time."
[Scammers Take Aim at Diablo III Hype]
Blizzard Entertainment did not immediately return a request for comment from SecurityNewsDaily.
The gaming site Eurogamer reported that on Sunday (May 20), Blizzard's European "Diablo III" servers went offline for about four hours. "It has been suggested that the EU servers were taken offline following a SQL injection attack, but this remains unconfirmed," Eurogamer's Wesley Yin-Poole wrote.
On the Blizzard forum, angry gamers theorized that the account problems were likely caused by hackers, who historically prey on big-ticket games, especially just after their release.
But Blizzard shot down the notion of a hack. In a post on the Blizzard forum, an administrator wrote, "Historically, the release of a new game — such as World of Warcraft expansion — will result in an increase in reports of individual account compromises, and that's exactly what we're seeing now with Diablo III."
Yesterday (May 22), a Blizzard forum community manager further dispelled the idea that hackers are behind the raided accounts, writing, "Despite the claims and theories being made, we have yet to find any situations in which a person's account was not compromised through traditional means of someone else logging into their account through the use of their password."
