Just a friendly warning for my fellow Escapists about a hack that's doing the rounds at the moment.
This morning (10/10/2011), I tried to sign into my XBL account for a quick blast of Gears 3 on Insane (yes, I go basic achievement hunting, and yes, I must be a glutton for punishment or something), to be told no less than twice, that my details were invalid. Wuh?
"Okay," thinks me, "it's just the console having a Microsoft moment, I'll just recover the GT, no problem." After waiting ages for my crappy internet to redownload my profile information (thanks a lot, Sky), I finally log in.
What the crap is this? FIFA 12 with two achievements? But I don't own...oh crap. My MS Points are gone. All 2100 of them.
It seems some spoddy little arsewipe, or group of spoddy little arsewipes, is going around jacking people's accounts and emptying them of points by spending them all on "Premium Gold Pack" and "Premium Silver Pack" DLC for FIFA 12, while playing a basic amount to get a couple of achievements. They're also not above using associated bank cards to charge ridiculous sums of MSP's (usually in the order of around 10k points), then empty them on the above DLC. The kicker is, those DLC packs don't appear in your download lists for whatever reason, but they do at least appear on your Billing and Payment page on the XBL site.
This has been going on at least since the back end of last month, and Microsoft don't seem to be doing much about it except on a reactionary level. I.e. nothing gets done until customers phone and complain about their accounts getting hacked. It seems there's absolutely nothing you can do about your account getting jacked, as I have read reports of people spotting the unauthorised purchases and nabbing their account back, changing their password, only to have their account re-jacked in minutes.
This suggests to me that whoever is doing this, has a major door-jam holding open a backdoor to LIVE's database somewhere. What boggles my mind is this has been going on for at least a couple of weeks now and nothing has been done to try and combat it. MS haven't even tried warning customers that this is going on, keeping it all very hush hush. This smacks of the PSN hack a few months ago and the way this is going, it certainly is almost at the same level.
So yes, this a warning to my fellow Escapists that own 360's to disassociate any credit/debit cards that are on your XBL account to avoid any surcharges. To those who don't have cards but do have points, just cross your fingers and hope you don't fall victim.
A couple of threads on this at the XBL forums, just so I don't look like a raving lunatic:
http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_support/f/12/t/103484.aspx (I have a post in here, first response)
http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_support/f/12/t/97215.aspx?PageIndex=1
There are more, lots more, but obviously I'm not going to link them all. Damn hackers.
CAPTCHA: buotio Helfmeyer), Mmm, sounds tasty.
This morning (10/10/2011), I tried to sign into my XBL account for a quick blast of Gears 3 on Insane (yes, I go basic achievement hunting, and yes, I must be a glutton for punishment or something), to be told no less than twice, that my details were invalid. Wuh?
"Okay," thinks me, "it's just the console having a Microsoft moment, I'll just recover the GT, no problem." After waiting ages for my crappy internet to redownload my profile information (thanks a lot, Sky), I finally log in.
What the crap is this? FIFA 12 with two achievements? But I don't own...oh crap. My MS Points are gone. All 2100 of them.
It seems some spoddy little arsewipe, or group of spoddy little arsewipes, is going around jacking people's accounts and emptying them of points by spending them all on "Premium Gold Pack" and "Premium Silver Pack" DLC for FIFA 12, while playing a basic amount to get a couple of achievements. They're also not above using associated bank cards to charge ridiculous sums of MSP's (usually in the order of around 10k points), then empty them on the above DLC. The kicker is, those DLC packs don't appear in your download lists for whatever reason, but they do at least appear on your Billing and Payment page on the XBL site.
This has been going on at least since the back end of last month, and Microsoft don't seem to be doing much about it except on a reactionary level. I.e. nothing gets done until customers phone and complain about their accounts getting hacked. It seems there's absolutely nothing you can do about your account getting jacked, as I have read reports of people spotting the unauthorised purchases and nabbing their account back, changing their password, only to have their account re-jacked in minutes.
This suggests to me that whoever is doing this, has a major door-jam holding open a backdoor to LIVE's database somewhere. What boggles my mind is this has been going on for at least a couple of weeks now and nothing has been done to try and combat it. MS haven't even tried warning customers that this is going on, keeping it all very hush hush. This smacks of the PSN hack a few months ago and the way this is going, it certainly is almost at the same level.
So yes, this a warning to my fellow Escapists that own 360's to disassociate any credit/debit cards that are on your XBL account to avoid any surcharges. To those who don't have cards but do have points, just cross your fingers and hope you don't fall victim.
A couple of threads on this at the XBL forums, just so I don't look like a raving lunatic:
http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_support/f/12/t/103484.aspx (I have a post in here, first response)
http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_support/f/12/t/97215.aspx?PageIndex=1
There are more, lots more, but obviously I'm not going to link them all. Damn hackers.
CAPTCHA: buotio Helfmeyer), Mmm, sounds tasty.
