Hindsight is 20/20- Hacked (WoW)

So it's been a couple of weeks since I last logged into WoW. This morning I had two emails from Blizzard. I was thinking, 'Geez what happened to my account... When was the last time I logged in?' Yes, it's still active, I've been meaning to log in the past few days. Apparently while I was asleep last night my character was spamming trade chat with gold seller spam. To protect my account Blizzard suspended it for three hours and sent a password reset request. Basically it was locked out for three hours and the password was locked until I could get to it.

I suppose it was my fault to some point. I let my son play around on my account and he plays on his computer and his two uncle's computers sometimes as well. While one of them tries to keep things in check as far as viruses go the other doesn't always. So that, as far as I know, is most likely what happened. No other accounts have been messed with. I make sure to scan and check my computer on a regular basis with a couple of programs so I'm 99.9% sure it wasn't anything harmful on my machine. I even checked again this morning, nothing.

What I should have done was change the password on a regular basis. I was lazy and thought it wouldn't happen to me. I knew in the back of my mind it was a possibility when the account was played on machines other than mine.

I am impressed with Blizzard's response, if it wasn't for them I probably wouldn't have noticed for quite awhile. They locked the account for security and made sure the password was reset in order to log in again, how many companies go the extra mile to do that? While I don't play WoW as much I thought of how they are on top of things and greatly appreciated it.

My gear is gone, sharded, even my bags were sold off. One character was at a mailbox, it looks as if they were fixing to send the shards and money to another account. My bank was cleaned out and my character was in some silly cosmetic gear from some holiday events. I was pretty pissed about the whole thing, I'm glad I've been on hiatus for awhile or I probably would have went into BERSERK mode.

I sent in an email to ask for my items to be restored,  I'm still waiting to see what comes of that. I'm going to be more on top of things in the future and keep passwords changed on a regular basis. That's part of my problem I get into a groove and like to stay there.

Words to the wise, keep your passwords changed, don't let your games be run on machines you cannot monitor and just try to be as safe as you can be. One of these days I'm going to break down and get an authenticator just for the extra safety. Hindsight is 20/20. My thanks to Blizzard for helping protect my account.

-kaozz