[Uthgaard]

Lately, the amount of account theft petitions has risen somewhat. If you are sharing your account, stop it. I don't care why, just stop it. It's usually impossible to restore you to the way you were before. No matter what I do, you're going to be worse off than when you started, at best. The process also takes a very long time.

There is a P99/Eqemulator targetted trojan floating around. It may be on a related website, in someone's sig, or part of a third party program distro you shouldn't be using anyway. Be wary of 'undetectable' or other grandiose claims.

These only account for a very small amount of the petitions. Most of these are the fault of the user. No matter how much you think you can trust someone else with your account, unless you can easily come within range to physically assault that person and succeed, you can't trust them.

This applies to everyone on the server. Get this done this weekend. There is no cause for alarm, but listen to me when I'm telling you that you'd rather be preventing the situation for 15 minutes than fixing it for 2 weeks+.

DO: Run an antivirus. If you really don't have one, beep me in irc and I'll get you a link to a good one. If you do turn up a trojan, get the file's created/modified date and timestamp from its properties. Then go into your browser and paste me your browsing history for that day so I can pinpoint its origin.
DO: Stop sharing your accounts with your guildmates and "friends". Right now. 9 out of 10 of the petitions that I see are people that just can't believe their "friend" would do that to them.
DO: Be absolutely honest from the start. Withholding information or bending the truth so it looks like you were innocent just wastes both of our time. I'll just figure it out anway, and if you aren't truthful with me from the start, I'm not going to invest the extra time to fix it.
DON'T: Assume that you are safe because you haven't been hacked. The related IPs have logged into a number accounts that haven't been touched yet. I've attempted to contact some of these people but we don't keep contact information for people outside of the game.
DON'T: Change your password without running an antivirus. These aren't being brute forced or guessed. They're logging right in on their first attempt.

I'll answer any questions pertaining to this, but any unrelated comments will be deleted. This thread needs to stay on topic and relevant so people can get the information they need without sifting through a bunch of crap.