How do you keep your online gaming accounts safe?

[bpgt64]

First, a story;

It's 4am this morning and I randomly wakeup to my phone vibrating on my night stand with a new email. I am a support tech with clients on the West Coast, UK, Africa...so I am kind of all over the place at work. But this is an email regarding one of my gaming accounts. Specifically my battle.net account. Someone, somehow obtained access to my account and changed the password. Now, they should have known better when they viewed my World of Warcraft account as inactive for the past 10 months. But instead they activated my WoW account and changed the password. This is what tipped me off. So I scramble over to my computer to confirm this nightmare(in that I have SC2 beta access and thats what I really cared about). And reset the password using the "secret question". I proceeded to then change the email and password and Secret question again for good measure. I logged into the WoW account, and no gold, or items had been deleted. Not that I really cared so much as just wanted to make sure.

I have in the past few years moved from physical disks, to entirely downloadable content. Through such means as Steam, EA download manager, and the like. I was wondering, How do you all keep all your accounts safe? rotate passwords, a full host of Virus Scan/Malware etc etc?

I missed out on an hour of sleep changing all my passwords, for all sorts of accounts that used that email and pass. But to the question above, What do you do in an age of digital theft?

I myself loaded up AVG, which I didn't have before, I usually use offsite scan software to check up on my system. I am considering getting a Battle.net Authenticator as well...

 

[Deleted member 24505]

My wow account got hacked,they stripped all my toons.I got all my stuff back though and got myself an authenticator.

 

[D007]

There is no way to keep yourself truly safe.
You have done all that you can.
Changing your passwords is the best method imo.

Unless this authenticator has better results?
I'm not familiar with it.
Please elaborate, any links or info would be nice.
Something I would like to look into also, seeing as most of my things come through digital distribution as well now a days.

 

[bpgt64]

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=24660

Is how it works. I have been considering getting one with SC2 and Diablo 3 coming down the pipes.

 

[erocker]

A long password and I check my system for keyloggers using Spybot and Malwarebytes. Never had a password stolen in my computing life.. That I know of.

 

[Lionheart]

Is spybot any good?

 

[933k]

All anti-virus and anti-malware are useless these days!

Now that is a bold claim and you might be calling BS, but i'll tell you why.

Any experienced blackhat will have crypted their stealer/logger/RAT with a recent stub.

What does that mean? They have scrambled the code so your anti-virus/malware can't read it.

Here is an example:

uncrypted

same file crypted

Eventually once the virus is spread around and the security companies have analyzed and updated their definitions, it can be detected but this could take 1-2 weeks even longer and during this time the blackhat could have all your passwords or worse have control of your system.

The only way to know if your system has been compromised, is to install a packet sniffer like wireshark and do you own examination of the traffic going in and out of your computer.

So how do you protect yourself against this sort of threat.

On my windows machine I have a virtual machine with linux installed, a linux system can't get infected with windows viruses (the only place i have come across a virus in linux was in the wine directory, wine is for running windows programs). I recommend Ubuntu for easy of use, but take a look at Mint or Sabayon. If you don't like linux you can always install windows too. For virtual machine i use VirtualBox which is free and VMware, the player version is free too.

Why use a virtual machine, well if your virtual OS gets compromised you can reinstall or if you're smart you would have taken a snapshot which you can revert to, though i have only come across 2 methods of this happening in linux, bruteforced the password and software installation from a rogue repository. If your virtual OS is windows reverting to an earlier snapshot is much safer than a sytem restore on your main harddrive install as some viruses inject themselves in the memory and self-propagate after the restore. A virtual machine install is like having an extra barrier of protection.

Use a proxy! This is especially important if you ip address is static. If the blackhat doesn't know where you live they won't come back to attack you. Hotshield, JOndo are two i use and sometimes the list from here after scanning them with proxyfire to make sure they are safe.

Get a good firewall, this will allow you to control what is going in and out of your system.

Of course the methods above is not 100% foolproof but it will deter the blackhat and hopefully they move on to a easier victim and leave you alone.