I am receiving threats that I will be hacked

TheAstaroath · February 2019

After a heated dispute with one of my irl friends last week for mostly petty reasons, he threatened to hack my ESO account and delete my characters and progress. I ignored his threats as a hollow threat during the hit of the moment at first, but after he declared and kept insisting with maliciously serious intent in his voice several times since last week and during this week that he payed cash via PayPal to a known notorious local hacker, that supposedly was previously involved in known hacking incidents in Blizzard's World of Warcraft and NCSOFT's Lineage II, I am beginning to worry about my account's safety.

Is there even a one in a million possibility that without knowing any information about me, neither email nor IP, let alone my credentials, that someone can locate me, access my PC or even directly access Zenimax's servers and completely wipe my account data without being located by Zenimax ?

I want to clarify that I do not personally share any contact information with the alleged bribed hacker, and only share a discord server with my irl soon-to-be-ex friend, if he continues to threaten me. As a precaution, I have blocked any receiving messages from my "friend" on discord, in case he sends me a trojan or other virus, as well as any receiving messages from anyone I do not share a contact with, and updated my Windows OS, Windows Defender, anti-virus and BIOS to the latest versions.

Spark · February 2019

Just.. make sure you have unique (never used anywhere else) strong passwords for both your account and your recovery email.
Different passwords. If necessary, google what constitutes a strong password. You will be fine.

Turelus · February 2019

Make sure you use an email on the account he may not be aware of.
Enable any two factor authentication on anything which allows it.
Make sure any secret questions have answers he doesn't know (even if you make up an answer i.e. fake maiden name etc.)
Have strong passwords on all accounts.

No one can access your PC without first placing malicious files on it, just make sure you have an up to date anti-virus (Windows Defender is fine), even if they gain access to your PC they would need to log into ESO in order to delete your characters.

The chances of anyone hacking ZOS to wipe your account would be very slim, you really don't need to worry about that.

Lastly you have someone who is openly admitting criminal actions, if you have any of these threats in chat conversations then should anything actually happen you literally have the evidence to get him charged by the police.

idk · February 2019

Spark wrote: »

Just.. make sure you have unique (never used anywhere else) strong passwords for both your account and your recovery email.
Different passwords. If necessary, google what constitutes a strong password. You will be fine.

And change them to they fit this. Do not keep any passwords the same as they were before the threats in case they happened to have noticed some of them.

It is a good practice to change passwords regularly though that an be a pain. This is a time that the pain is most certainly worth it.

spartycus · February 2019

LOL! - I'd like to know more about this story. What happened between you and your friend? Why is he so angry with you? What did you do? If anything why is he accusing you?

Jayman1000 · February 2019

TheAstaroath wrote: »

Is there even a one in a million possibility....?.

A one in a million possibility? well.. possibly/possibly not. 1/1000000 is really low though.

Make a unique safe password that is not used anywhere else. Your account shall not be hacked. Zos system also protects your account if you login with the correct username and password from an unknown device. When that happens your email will get send a one-time code that you have to enter to be allowed to login. Technically he would have to also hack the mail that you use for eso, then make sure to access your mail to get the code.

So to pull it of he would have to:

- Somehow know your username and password. If you make it unique and strong(for example random) this will be impossible to guess.
- Gain access to your email to get the one-time code (again by guessing your password and your mail used for eso).

OR

- Actually hack his way into zos database and steal passwords and usernames, then crack the encryption and figure out which one is yours. This is highly unlikely for the described scenario. He'd still have to also hack your mail and get the one-time code.

TLDR; No. Especially not if you have made a proper password.

Unstable.Pixel · February 2019

Maybe you should just kick his ass?