Warning From PlayOnline (5/21/07)

Aangeliceus

Aangeliceus

Kitteh's Meow
FC/Leadership
PlayOnline said:
<TABLE class=ta_info3 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=480 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=500>Recently, we have received numerous calls from players who have had a third party log in to their PlayOnline account. This has resulted in lost items, gil, or even deleted characters.

Among these reports, there where many reports of players connecting to a site in order to get unauthorized third party programs, or actually using a third party program, were then infected with harmful programs such as viruses and spyware. In these cases, these programs likely transmitted PlayOnline IDs and passwords to a third party. Additionally, there were reports of players who had suspicious programs installed when connecting to websites that were told to them by strange players over the tell channel. In these cases, many people also were affected by unauthorized account access. We have also confirmed in our investigations that there are third party programs that can do these things out there.

These unauthorized programs are of a wide variety. Some make it so that FINAL FANTASY XI runs in a windowed mode rather than full screen, some allow players to transport to a spot when a specific monster spawns, and some that commence attacks on monsters automatically. Now, any use of a third party program is a violation of the PlayOnline user agreement. We will issue a serious penalty when we have evidence of a third party program being used.

To protect players from having their accounts logged into, on May 11, 2007, we posted "Notice for Windows Users: Recommended Precautionary Measures" on "Important Notices". If you are playing with the windows version, please read the announcement and we ask you to be extra cautious.

If you are unable to log-in with your PlayOnline account/password, or notice a change in your gil or items, please do not hesitate to contact us.

To protect your valuable characters and their data, and to also prevent you from being penalized for violating the user agreement, please keep away from third party programs and suspicious URLs.



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http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/polnews/news10410.shtml

Side Note: An added side effect of this is if you have other peoples' account information and passwords stored on the same computer, they can be hacked as well.

Examples:

http://www.bluegartrls.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19234 (Started 5/14/07)

http://www.killingifrit.com/forums.php?m=posts&q=153956 (Started 5/14/07)

Just don't do it. >.>
 
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Yet it doesn't mention the recovery of any accounts comprimised by the malicious program. Looks like those people might be boned.
 
I think they want to be contacted mostly for information gathering purposes, not to restoring anything on the account that was comprimised by the CONSCIOUS use of a third party program. Given SE's track record, that's just my assumption. They may very well restore those characters back to the original state as well as ban the accounts that recieved the monies from the victims.

Forgot to mention that the latter is one of the signs of the apocolypse.
 
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Well, the scam I saw on our server wasn't a third-party program (at least, it wasn't advertised as such). It was a bogus link to a .zip file that had an auto-executed app inside that ran when uncompressed, sending POL and FFXI info out.

You'd have to be really computer-retarded or be ridiculously wasted to open a file like that, but it certainly wasn't some sort of third-party "tool" like I consider Windower or botting programs to be.

It was obviously different on other servers, but people on Valefor who got screwed seemed to be legit for the most part.
 
A guy had his ex items tossed but was able to put in a request to have them restored. Will know soon if he gets them all back or not.

It was advertised in tells as gilfinder secrets but it was a third party program. Mr rabbit or something.
 
SE: "THIS IS WUT HAPPENS WEN U USE WINDOWAR ORZ!"
 
As for the guy with ex items toss, request denied. he didn't have the info for where they dropped them where, when etc.
 
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