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W3c needs tighter net security. (Little Upsilon)

Topics: General: W3c needs tighter net security. (Little Upsilon)

Psycho_Honey (Little Upsilon)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 03:32 am Click here to edit this post
I suspect there is/was a lot of hacking going on in this community. The way certain information is gained and shared throughout the community is becoming a problem. People's settings change, for some unknown reason unchanging code does not perform as written or expected.

Hacking in Online games like this one is not only common, but highly lucrative, attractive and challenging, therefore attracting a lot of would be hackers and 'sore-losers'

The fact that hacking in some very simple forms is occurring should be of concern to the owners of this site. Then there is cause for concern of a moderate or experienced hacker 'really' exploiting the game. The way w3c has been absent to address minor concerns gives opportunity for these people to exploit the system when the backup servers are only saving data for a few days at most. By the time w3c has any time to respond the data necessary to verify the hacks would be long gone.

w3c you need to monitor and improve the security of your website in order to preserve the integrity of this game.

Keto (Golden Rainbow)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 03:54 am Click here to edit this post
Where did that come from?

Scarlet (Little Upsilon)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 06:19 am Click here to edit this post
Keto, game's clearly infested with hackers. Wendy can't make a profit and she's losing C3s left and right.

ViC (Kebir Blue)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 06:26 am Click here to edit this post
Well I have noticed strange things since I came back. Setting or products I don't recall changing or ordering...

guess changing my password should be a weekly thing... :(

Psycho_Honey (Little Upsilon)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 06:35 am Click here to edit this post
Seriously Scarlet. I've certainly made more off this game in the last 6 months than you have in your entire SC career.

When have you ever in your natural SC life held a coin, much less sold any? Never. Because you don't make any. I have empires intentionally losing money on 3 worlds that cost me 90 coins per month + the debt accrued for no other reason than I just like them sitting there and have nothing better to do with the coins I have made lately. Get your weight up and get back to me, chump.

Just Looking (Fearless Blue)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 05:51 pm Click here to edit this post
Wendy you could always sell 500gc to me

Psycho_Honey (Little Upsilon)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 07:48 pm Click here to edit this post
haha, I'm on that later today, I'm just waiting for the stupid game to recognize I have no more loans lol.

Theokles

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 07:55 pm Click here to edit this post
Oh my...Psycho Honey I love the way you responded to scarlet, your my type of women!! haha! So business savvy!

Psycho_Honey (Little Upsilon)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 08:32 pm Click here to edit this post
lol

Josias (Little Upsilon)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 08:50 pm Click here to edit this post
thing i'm curious about, if some one is smart enough to hack wendy's account, and screw with her settings, why wouldn't they turn off her war protection? curious thought.

NiAi (Little Upsilon)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 09:16 pm Click here to edit this post
My meagre account has experienced some change in settings time to time. Ive always thought it was some silly bug. But evil hackers sounds much more fun of an explanation ;)

Seriously thou, W3C should always improve net security since this game involves RL cash (which increases the stakes). And not at very least, fix all those small but irritating bugs.

Psycho_Honey (Little Upsilon)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 09:21 pm Click here to edit this post
so as not to be obvious? Besides, your dense mind has you stuck on trivial things. I'm talking about hacking 'the game' in order to gain an advantage. I suspect there is a little account hacking but that would be a little harder and more detectable than running a script to mess up player settings, or screw up the code(that doesn't mutate btw).

The easiest and most beneficial hacks would be those that involve cheating or manipulation of the economic aspect of the game or disrupting the mechanics of the war engine. The knowledge of what will or won't happen in advance of a war could have devastating consequences and is not entirely hard to pull off. The difficulty of the deal is not getting caught.

So, to answer your question...

If someone like myself who is known to keep wp on was suddenly hacked and my WP was turned off, then I complained on the forum about it, I expect w3c would take that very seriously, investigate and find out what the issue was. Most likely, depending on how deep w3c wanted to go, they would indeed find out who it was, and if the hacker was sloppy, they'd be caught. Josias, a hacker isn't trying to get caught by drawing unnecessary attention to themselves, which as all that would be accomplished by doing something like that, duh.

OsterTech (Golden Rainbow)

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 10:47 pm Click here to edit this post
OsterTech has an internal security division : 3 battalions of SAS with M14's are guarding my account :D

Psycho_Honey (Little Upsilon)

Thursday, February 24, 2011 - 03:20 am Click here to edit this post
Just looking, I'm ready now. I'll be in chat around 11pm EST

ViC (Kebir Blue)

Thursday, February 24, 2011 - 06:17 am Click here to edit this post
Is the IRC chat still availalbe? I have been looking for the link but can't find it in the forums.. I suspect the thread might have been deleted?

Scarlet (Little Upsilon)

Thursday, February 24, 2011 - 06:30 am Click here to edit this post
This might help.
I'm fairly sure that it's still up, but I don't use IRC so I really don't know.

ViC (Kebir Blue)

Thursday, February 24, 2011 - 01:59 pm Click here to edit this post
Thank you Scarlet

Tom Willard

Friday, February 25, 2011 - 01:02 am Click here to edit this post
The number of times we have seen proof of the hacking of an account in the past years or in fact from the first day the game runs, can be counted on one hand.

In all but one case, the player gave his password to another player.

There might have been more such cases but we did not receive a complaint.

Those we did recieve, we looked into and just recently, gave an account back to the legal owner.

settings are not changed spontanously.
there are some automatic support functions that will intervene if the country is sinking and the player either does not login or the country is close to bankruptcy.

we had some people complain about these changes and we have told them how to prevent them by managing the needed changes by themselves.

Psycho_Honey (Little Upsilon)

Friday, February 25, 2011 - 01:30 am Click here to edit this post
Thanks for the response Tom.

Interestingly enough, I agree, settings do not change spontaneously. But they have been noted to spontaneously change. That would qualify as a paradox huh?

However, most of the settings that have changed recently have been noted by players who are not irresponsible or negligent towards their countries or enterprises. Interestingly enough, I agree also that the account tampering is minor, and rare if it occurs at all.

But, game hacks is what I am speaking of. After doing some investigation of my own after my account crossing a few months back with that of a very prominent player known with threatening players with hacking stating 'I've got your IP' I have actually come to the reality that it is indeed very easy, and possibly even more likely that game hacks are responsible for at least some of the very random inconsistencies especially during wars.

Scripts are extremely easy to write or find on the net, and equally as easy to run them into the game code even on SimCountry servers.

I had a few friends do some digging after my last incident with the account crossing and they explained that it was very likely that someone had spoofed my own session using cookies and they actually left cookies on my system and the game may or may not have recognized their cookie briefly.

Additionally, players who multi account using proxy servers to avoid detection also leave cookies that can be accessed by anyone who later goes to use the proxy server afterward. If more than one person uses that very same proxy, it is likely that either session will be recognized even after login.

I have noted that I have played this game for a lot longer than I had previously put on, and most of you won't remember, but some country was randomly named, 'AMECHE YOUR F****G DEAD' or something along those lines. There wasn't a public spectacle made of it, but I know it was the result of an account cross. The person who owned the country didn't rename it to that title.


I can paste links to just how common and easy it is for game hacks or scripts to be run but I don't want to encourage the retards here into hacktivism. It is a fact that some of the most popular and well funded games with dedicated full time staffs have been hacked in game accounts and game mechanics. This is not a fantasy, ignoring the real possibility is. I don't say this to provoke or encourage a negative response. Trust me, I say this because I actually care.


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