HTs on Global/Hackers
| From: | HT-Tjecken | (4097456.159) as reply to (4097456.51) | |
| To: Everybody | 04-10-2005 at 16:23 | ||
| First of all, this is indeed a very sad case. It's never fun to hear about 'hacking' cases and I truly wish we could do everything in our power to help out. But the cold truth is, we can't do everything for different reasons. But lets start from the beginning (and prepare yourself for a long post):
Let me first state that hacking, or rather "hacking", is very rare in this game. I call it "hacking" as we've never had a case of real hacking in this game, users who've got their accounts "hacked" have had lousy passwords, their registrated e-mail adress have been taken over by another owner etc. Another quite common thing is that the "hacker" is a very close friend to the user.. That said, "hacking cases" happen and we got to know how to deal with them in the best way we can think of. We learned the hard way a looong time ago that hacking cases are not as easy as they appear to be. We had a case where a user mailed the GMs saying his account was hacked. GMs locked the account for security reasons (standard procedure to prevent further damage while investigating the case). The user was of course not happy about it and begged the GMs to do whatever they could do to help out. After some investigation they opened up the team again and the user got his team back as they were sure it was his team. Well, a week later the real owner to the team mailed the GMs... This happened many many years ago, but we had to accept that we couldn't be as humane as we hoped we could be, which is very annoying if you ask me. Our first aim is to give back the team to the rightful owner, secondly to catch the hacker and third to see if there's something more we can do for the rightful owner.Today we have more tools etc to deal with this kind of cases, but that doesn't mean we can help out with everything related to these cases. I know it might sound a little harsh, but every user must realise that he/she is responsible for his/her own account. Ever user must realise that they got to think about their own personal security, because no matter how hard we try we can not protect you and we can not save you from every danger there is. And the truth is, the more we protect you from danger the more secure you feel and the less you protect yourself from danger. So, by protecting you more it's quite likely that we would end up protecting you less. I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything at all, we should of course help out as much as we can, but we also got to think very carefully about the consequenses of our aid. If we start to give economical aid for everything the "hacker" may have caused, then we would have far more cases of "hacking" and even worse: fake hacking (someone who has done a mistake and later claims he's been hacked (and/or making it look like hacking) in order to get that mistake undone) for example. That said, I think there are still things we can do to prevent this even more than we do today. Unfortunately, most things that prevent "hacking" (or lessen the damage of it) also affect the normal day life of all our users in a slightly negative way which of course also need to be taken under consideration. | |||
