After a wonderful date w/ my wife Friday night, I was so eager to get my day started Saturday. I felt ready to be productive around the house, ready to for some solid gaming time on the 2nd full weekend of the new World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
Then at 8:30AM, I realized that the "unthinkable" had happened with my gaming account. After years of system security obsession, my game password had been stolen. I had been Hacked. (Click the link to get the whole story.) Blizzard Entertainment had taken the necessary steps to freeze my account and start restoring my virtual stuff. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done. I obsessively needed to do a complete security review of every piece of hardware and software on my home network. No cleaning, yard work, meals or anything would get done until I knew that I knew the cause for this breach & had quashed it.
I'll skip the boring details and just say that I used "not my regular" computer to log on to WoW after it had been turned off for a while but before new virus definitions could be loaded. I should have, duh, changed my password (sooner than my usual once every 60 days) but it never dawned on me that I could actually have been hacked.
I'm back on the game today. I've made adjustments to my system security and have purchased authenticator keys which will make my video game security more protected than most online bank accounts. Sad really!
But, that one event was like a snowball at the top of a miserable weekend. I was pissy about the computer security. Slick was pissy about things needing to get done while I was dealing with the computers. Eventually we got a little pissy at eachother. Eventually we got a lot pissy at eachother. "Fights" are so rare in our household, that to have one on my birthday weekend is like the biggest anti-gift ever.
Thankfully, the whole thing became a catharsis for us. We both eventually started laughing and being really obnoxious with one another. Stuff started getting accomplished. And, while my account lock-out frustration kept rearing it's ugly head, we just kept moving past it to find "something better" to do with our time.
Sunday proved to be a bit better. Still no game access, but we moved passed that to get an over-due Costco trip out of the way. The house cleaning was finished for our guests. I accepted the reality of things. Slick played WoW and I watched my Tropic Thunder DvD from Netflix. Not our usual, intended, Sunday night, but it worked out.
It's going to be a good week with Slick's family and that's all that matters...that and questing after everyone goes to bed. Must level my Feral Druid Tank to 80 before Christmas vacation!
3 comments:
I understand the frustration and anger when things like this happen.
I have been running AVG for years but recently it has started failing updates randomly...that is annoying and dangerous (as Posey learned recently).
But once the infection is there, there's only so much that can be done.
I just learned of this software that appears to find more junk than Ad-aware or Spybot. It's Malware Bytes
You might want to try it.
Not that it's nice that you and Slick had a blow-up this weekend, but you're not alone. My wife and I had a big one ourselves over Wrath of the Lich King last week.
Don't know if that's any consolation, but...
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