So after a long day at work, I sat down at my computer attempted to log into Origin and kept getting a password error. It's funny because for the longest time I hadn't been using my Origin account until I bought the Sims 4 and Dragon Age... so I overlooked it as a loss of memory and sent a password change request.

I opened up my email address and noticed of a chain of emails from Origin reading..

"Your request to change your email has been completed..."

" Your request to change your password has been completed..."

At this point, I'm basically freaking out. Its an origin account I barely use on a computer I barely browse the internet on.. and it has been taken over by some Russian guy who calls himself Wakasar.

How could something like this happen? Have you ever been hacked? How did you handle it?

The only account of mine that has ever been hacked was my RuneScape account... I just shrugged it off... Then again, that's a different thing.

Thankfully not, but I've been notified of attempts. Most of which say it's coming from someone in China. I've had to change my password multiple times on my email because of it.

Oncr or twice I have gotten a Gmail notifiction that someone from Turkey was trying to access my account. Now that account is my only truly unique password.

not knowing how these happen is annoying, especially when it happened with my credit card (everything was resolved "easily" but it'd be nice knowing how the [censored] my info was stolen/where it was skimmed)

B.net account was also hacked, got that back easily. Can't remember if anything else was hacked.

I use "hacked" loosely, I have no idea what the heck happened.

One of my old e-mail accounts was hacked by someone in Russia a few years ago. Freaked me out a little.

Once I was scared into thinking my Steam account was hacked, but it was just a bug with the language selection when viewing the website on the browser. I still changed the password, though.

My WoW account was hacked a couple of years ago (even though I had an authenticator weirdly). I'll give Blizzard their due, they were quick in dealing with the issue and less than 6 hours after I reported it I had all my items and gold back.

yeah, Bliz had gotten good at that over the years... simply because of how often accounts are hacked..

about 6 months before the Burning Crusade launched, there was a major issue of people hacking into others accounts, going to mid-level areas that get decent (but not large) traffic (like stranglethorn vale), and selling accounts they just hacked in trade chat for like, $40 (most of which had numerous lvl 60s (the cap at the time))..

Bliz reverted everything afterwards so the original owners got their accounts back, which caused an uprising of complaints on the official forums saying "hey, I bought that account fair and square! why did you give it back to that guy? give me back that account or pay me back that money! I will sue unless you fix this!"

some of Bliz's reactions to these threads were downright hilarious

Yeah frequently for acouple of years some people used to do it on and off because they could, but they didnt do anything malicious, till someone actually tried to seriously hack me and the guys that used to do it tracked the guy down and about 15 hackers spent alot of time making this persons life a living hell, they thanked me after because they said they'd never laugh so much,because the hacker had threatened them and these guys were very very very good at what they did, he was a little fish swimming with sharks.

Quite worrying this sort of thing. I assume that these hackers don't need to get past internet security to hack into peoples games accounts and games are not protected by the likes of Norton and McAfee.

I'm just curious, is your e-mail account also hacked? Otherwise, how could they change your Origin password? Or am I missing something?

I have had some hacking, but usually it is taken care of with anew password. I did get my debit card hacked but my bank was cool in helping me out there

I remember when my WoW account was hacked a few years ago. They took all of my PVE and PVP gear, gear that I had been working so long and hard on obtaining. I remember logging on and seeing my inventory and bank inventory completely cleaned out.... I felt violated.

I wouldnt have cared if they hacked my WOW account till they changed everything to Battlenet.

When I said "a few years ago" I meant more like 4 but yeah it happened to me after the Battle.net change over. All my gear was restored a week later and I got one of those random PW generators connected to my account and never had a problem again.

Not sure what you mean by not caring until they changed over Battle.net... Why would getting hacked be any different with or without Battle.net?

My email is not hacked... not to my knowledge, anyways. It's a one off email that I never use and don't have anything attached to for anything but origin.

My Origin account was hacked by some Russian too. I didn't notice because I didn't log in for a long time. They added two friends, tried to buy something (failed) and played my games. I now have a character with a Russian name in Dragon Age Keep. They never got access to the email account tied to Origin, so I just changed the passwords and forgot about it. But now I remember I was going to contact support to get my secret question changed because I had no idea what the answer was when it came up. It seems I'm quite good at locking myself out, now if only I could keep others away.

The worst one was discovering there was some seemingly unauthorised activity on our servers one Sunday. I was starting to sort it out when the network went down, so I had to get the train into London. On a Sunday morning. I was not pleased.

I was without my car at the time, so I had to walk the mile-and-a-half to the station. Fortunately the Stansted Express was due, which was lucky because the usual trains that stop everywhere take approximately 3.5 aeons to travel the ~30 miles from Bishop's Stortford to London. When it turned up it was surprisingly busy, which I hadn't expected. Seems a plane full of sweaty journalists had just arrived at Stansted for no readily apparent reason.

At the other end I had another mile-and-a-half walk, unluckily to Fleet Street, which is perhaps why I opted not to take the Tube. I found our server in not much of a mess, some script-kiddie had found their way in through a newly discovered hole in bind (there's always a newly discovered hole in bind, it just seems to be one of those omnipresent facts) but had no idea what to do with the thing once he'd clubbed his way into it. A command history on a Unix server full of DIR and HELP suggests he perhaps wasn't entirely sure what he was doing. Hole quickly closed up and I returned home.

Then I saw on the news that Princess Diana died that weekend, hence all the sweaty journalists. What a day that was.

You might want to consider using this handy utility:

http://pwgen-win.sourceforge.net/

It makes it easy to create unique passwords that are virtually impossible to figure out. Once they're created, you can just save the information in a .txt file for future reference. I've been going on a spree lately trying to make my internet presence more secure, after getting a notice recently that a web site I visit had been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army. I now have unique passwords for almost all my accounts, plus several other security features that one poster turned me on to. I still have a few minor sites I don't get around to visiting much to create new passwords for, but the main ones are all done.

With shame i admit that once i had an account hacked through a false website password imput. It was only a yahoo account that had nothing attached but I lost complete control over it. I never have been duped since.

Recently because of Home Depot being infiltrated, my company credit card info got stolen. Thankfully AMEX caught it right away when some tried buying clothes with the first purchase, something I dont even buy with my personal credit card. My company credit card is used to buy supplies, materials, pay for services and contractors...so it eas easy to catch.

My credit union doesnt mess around with everything even potential stolen info, if they see you used your card at a compromised business, they set in process to cancel your card and overnight you new ones, and once you confirm recieving them your old card and new card gets deactivatd and activated immediately. I love my credit union.

I have a better setup. I don't use any credit cards so there's absolutely no chance of my info ever being stolen.

Just to make a fair point, I dont use w credit card either. Its actually a checkcard.

But hey, more power to you that you always use cash.

Had somebody from Korea try to access my facebook account once but that is it.

I don't actually, I use a debit card. I very rarely use cash these days. Every retailer accepts them so I don't see the need for having a credit card. And if I want to buy something online, I can just use PayPal. Of course there's always the chance that someone could hack my debit card, but since they need to have the actual card as well, it's highly unlikely they'll be able to get anything out of it. With credit cards, all you need is access to the number, which makes it much less secure.

Maybe I'm missing something, but there seems to be no difference in terms of usage between a debit card and a credit card. Credit cards actually provide more protection than debit cards, probably not least because it's not actually your money that you need to get back if it's defrauded.

You need to do a throrough malware scan of your computer for keyloggers. It's malicious software that monitors what you type on your keyboard and is used to get ahold of your passwords. Use a script blocker for your web browser as well and only whitelist the websites you trust.

I got my World of Warcraft account compromised in 2008. Twice in a quick succession. It was during this time that a security hole was discovered in Flash and this wasn't announced until it was too late for me. So I likely got keyloggers installed on my computer via Flash ads from websites like MMO-Champion. Since then I've been running NoScript in Firefox, and I always type in all my login details in a jumbled semi-backwards fashion.