Well, well. It would appear that last week’s rumors about all the World of Warcraft account thefts were true. DO NOT CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK IF YOU USE INTERNET EXPLORER. In fact, no one click, I’ll quote for you.

From Allakhazam’s front page, posted last Friday (10/7/05):

This only applies to you if you are running an older version of Internet Explorer, have not updated windows with the latest security patches and do not have virus protection on your computer. Apparantly one of our ad providers was affected by a trojan and was serving it to our site for several days last weekend. This is a keylogger and could possibly compromise your game login and password. As soon as we discovered it, we pulled all of their ads.

To see if you got the trojan, go to Program Files/Internet Explorer in your directory and look for a file named “syssmss.exe”. If it is there, then open your task manager and delete the file. Also go to %WIN_DIR%\Downloaded Program Files and delete a file named either “fucksnow.exe” or “muma.exe”. Then once you have done that, log into the game and change your password. In fact, change every password for every place you have typed since you got the trojan.

There are also several online sites that scan your computer for free.

http://www.windowsecurity.com/trojanscan/
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

We apologize for this. In 6 years of running this site, nothing like this has ever happened. It kills me to think that we may have, even inadvertantly, caused anyone to have their account compromised. We’re all about making the games better and more fun. Believe me, we will do everything in our power to make sure it does not happen again.

Along with the advertiser who sent this, and in cooperation with the FBI, we are attempting to track down the people who sent this. I hope I get a few minutes in a back room with the bastards.

– Allakhazam

The news finally made it’s way to the Warcraft General stickied posts (the last paragraph is the update) over the weekend, otherwise I would have had a good laugh last Friday. Not that Blizzard or the stricken players have any blame here, but infuckingcredible.

And what the hell are people thinking by going to Allakhazam’s anyhow??? That place is a sty. Plus, the name is hard to spell. And, there’s at least 2,098 better places to get Warcraft info than that pit.

With all the forum and ingame warnings about “make sure you use a good password, don’t share your password, don’t use third party mods with executables, don’t drive on the railroad tracks”, my guild had all but given up on the Damage Meters mod, which, for the non-WoWzers, displays each players’ damage, tanking, and healing stats. I was the only guildmate still running the thing, which, apparently, uses an executable. Whatever, I didn’t and don’t care.

Maybe things can get back to normal now so I don’t have to spam raid chat after every damn boss kill for the benefit of the rogue egos.

In between spamage reports, if a rogue asks how he’s doing for damage, I like to tell him (her) that he’s dropped down a few positions. This pretty much ensures that he (she) will go balls out on the next few pulls to pump the stats. I guess we all know what that means.

Dead rogue.