LOL All I have to ssay is Hell yes about an EQ 2.. gimme gimme!

Any one here play magic LOL!!! (MTG)
Changing the subject? why not

Reguardless...
The US liability laws, you are only Liable for $50... If you have reported your card stolen... This includes Internet fraud or theft of the slips from the knuckle busters they run credit cards on from the pre-magnetic strip era.
So when they try to sell you insurance on your Credit cards and Debit cards... they are full of crap and trying to milk you. (My x-father in law was a district manager for Hells Fargo, greedy bastards)

Firewalls...
All routers and most firewalls have a special passwords that allows access by the companys that produced them. An accociate of mine had a router that wasn't working properly and the Tech at the manufaturers accessed it remotly and tried some settings. Without us giving him the access information or passwords. It was a last resort move for them but they have the service access there. (They still had to ship a new router...)

I have heard rumors the Brad has left for greener pastures. Some say personal reasons, some said it was a falling out about the direction the game was going? (I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that one.)

If you don't know who he is... He's one of the people who started this whole EQ ball rolling and was part of the origional creation of the game. For him to leave has ramifications that are yet to be seen (If the rumor is true)

Reguardless...
The US liability laws, you are only Liable for $50... If you have reported your card stolen... This includes Internet fraud or theft of the slips from the knuckle busters they run credit cards on from the pre-magnetic strip era.
So when they try to sell you insurance on your Credit cards and Debit cards... they are full of crap and trying to milk you. (My x-father in law was a district manager for Hells Fargo, greedy bastards)

Firewalls...
All routers and most firewalls have a special passwords that allows access by the companys that produced them. An accociate of mine had a router that wasn't working properly and the Tech at the manufaturers accessed it remotly and tried some settings. Without us giving him the access information or passwords. It was a last resort move for them but they have the service access there. (They still had to ship a new router...)

I have heard rumors the Brad has left for greener pastures. Some say personal reasons, some said it was a falling out about the direction the game was going? (I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that one.)

If you don't know who he is... He's one of the people who started this whole EQ ball rolling and was part of the origional creation of the game. For him to leave has ramifications that are yet to be seen (If the rumor is true)

Who what when where why are we asking why asking who asking where asking when asking what its all one big mess. Just remember if its not something thats hurt you then dont let it bother you. Stress makes you old, chill and be groovy.

There will be a EQ2 for those of you who do not know SoL's new look is just a testing group for the new engine to make sure all bugs are worked out there been many statements from the dev. team to this fact...

I have a couple of simple questions??
1=How long ago was this Hack in supposed to have happened? A year or more now!
2=How many ppl have had there accounts messed up over this? I haven't heard of any so do me a favor and quit whinning over it!

Thanks and have a nice life =)

whats the big deal and who the heck is brad and who cares?

This is utterly unfeasable as a news article, anybody who plays the game of everquest will know, or at least seriously doubt the validity of this article. My statement originates from one simple fact.

"Everquest 2" we are obviously dealing with a newsreporter who has never played this game to understand that at the time of this articles writing, everquest could already be referred to as the 4th or even 5th edition of the game with the patchwork and advancements and enhancements done in game by Verant.

When the reporter makes the statement of "everquest 2", he is making a presumption that this game is like Ultima Online, or Diable, etc. Where the manufacturers of the game, to make more money, issue "updated" retail versions of the game, which completely changes the style and playing of the game itself. This reporter obviously never did his research as to how uniquely different this game of Everquest is compared to other products in the market of video games. Especially at the time of the article, consider, Ashron's Call was the first "copycat" style of this type of gaming.

To me, with the sensationalism that the "press" has a fondness of emphasizing to get a reader's/viewer's/listener's attention to pay attention to their form of reporting of information. We have a reporter who wrote an article based on presumptions on the video game market for PC's and not facts directly related to the game of Everquest.

Because of that reporter's interest in getting an article printed to get paid, he took a very uproveable rumor of somebody "hacking" into one person's computer and embelished it with, to the non initiated of this game, with industry standard tidbits of information of the pc gaming market, to make it sound feasable to an editor.

The whole article to me, should seriously be considered a large part fabrication of poorly informed reporter who acted on a very small and unsubstantiated tidbit of information.

Dreamchase
40th level wizard on Xegony

ZONEALARM peoples,a great FREE firewall. zonealarm.com, it is a must.

First let me start by saying internet fraud is my professional specialty. Preventing it and putting offenders behind bars, that is. I enjoy my job, yet sometimes get dismayed when something like this happens and gets exposed.

Let's assume Brad's computer was "hacked" (I hate that word, but it's still in vogue) by this teen in Snoqualmie and the suspect in Alabama. These people then used superuser access to look at the company private message board as well as fiddle with their own accounts (and possibly others.) How could this have happened at what are the chances our private credit card information could have been compromised?

For the how part, my own personal experience has been that over 90% of all break ins that pass firewalls are due to a lapse on the part of the victim regarding emails and files, 9% or so involve "inside jobs" where people who work with the company help the breakin attempt and about 1% involve true "cracking" of a system. I'd rule out inside job as the suspects are in different states, and concentrate on the 90% chance of a personal lapse.

Brad's a nice guy, loves his work, and has a legion of fans in the gaming community (and detractors as well, but let's think of fans.) I'd venture to guess with his love for EQ he spends as much of his "off work" time playing with the game and working on new stuff as his "work time." This would require a nice broadband access system for his home computer, probably VDSL or a cable modem. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he has at the very least a fairly modern firewall on his home network. So, how did the creep get access? Possibly because Brad is a nice guy.

Imagine you get 100s of emails a day, some hatemail, some fanmail, some suggestions on new spells and such. After awhile, you get to know the addresses of the folks with ideas fairly well; so you make sure to always read their mails. Sometimes, they come with attachments, pictures, screenshots, code, excel spreadsheets, whathaveyou. Hidden in one of those screenshots from a fan who is trying to get on as a graphic artist is a visual basic program. This program is what we in the trade call a "Trojan Horse" program. It takes down Brads username and password, looks for a way to send off a message to the crook (preferably by sending out a email message using a free service like yahoo or hotmail to another such account,) and sends the crook the username and password. Since the victim's computer is probably always on, he or she has no idea that any info has been sent out; for the program is set up to wait until a certain amount of time has gone through before activating itself. It's also possible for the program to replicate itself into other attachments that the victim sends out, gaining access to other accounts within the target company. Since the crook now has the username and password of the victim, who is allowed to work from home, the crook can now access from anywhere as well. With access to a superuser account, the crook can look at an awful lot of information, but not credit card numbers.

Why am I so sure about the credit card numbers being safe from such an attempt? Simple. I used to work for an online game company, and I know the precautions *we* took with credit cards. All the card numbers were stored on a separate system, which did not have external access. No "work at homes" could see the credit card data, which meant when such an issue came up, we'd always defer our customers to on site Game Masters who could see that data. Knowing that at least one major figure from our company now works for Verant, I'd assume he made sure the same precautions were taken there.

So what could a person do to you if they had superuser access and knew your account name as well? Well, they could ban you or remove a ban, they could give or take away experience, skill points, items and cash or they could delete a character all together. For identity verification purposes, they could probably see your billing address and phone number, and most definately your name.

So, was confidential data avaialable to the crooks? Most likely. Was it anything that could ruin you financially? I'd bet money on no here. Was Brad guilty of Verant's own policy of not allowing other people access to your account no matter the reason? Yes. Being "hacked" is not a defense in Verant's eyes, lest everyone who was ever banned could claim someone hacked them and did the crime. Will Brad be banned? Heck no. They need him too much to fire him over something like this. Will this experience cause Verant to look closer at their security? I hope so. If they need an expert, I'm available at good rates...

Heh, the sad thing is, what really caught my attention about this article was the mention of "Everquest 2". Is that wrong? *starts looking in the phonebook for a psychiatrist*