This alleged mobile armory hack was discovered a few days ago when a forum post went
up asking how 200K gold escaped a user’s account. The US user in question had three
unauthorized auction house purchases for “white†(useless) quality items that
would normally be sold to a vendor for a few copper coins. Commenters made guesses
as to what the user could have done wrong to allow something like that to happen.
Did they attach an authenticator to their account? Did they have a good password?
Perhaps there was malware on their computer or phone?
In what people are calling a mobile armory hack, World of Warcraft Mobile Armory
users have literally watched as thousands of gold are swept away from them. They
watched it happen on their own phones. The Blizzard team has taken action by
shutting it all down. Here’s a tweet from Blizzard Customer Service that went out
this morning:
Greetings everyone. The Mobile Auction House will be unavailable until further
notice. No ETA as of yet. We’ll provide updates when we can.
The silver lining in this potential (alleged, supposed, rumored) mobile armory hack
is the track record that Blizzard has when this kind of thing happens. Once the dust
has settled and the software recoded, we will get an explanation of what happened
and people will get their gold back… and they will get to keep those level 1 axes.
Then reports came in of the same thing happening to others. UK users seemed to be
affected too. There was one thing everyone seemed to have in common: They all used
the mobile armory. This might be a huge coincidence as the armory app is free and
widely used, even if it just for trolling guild chat or showing your family your
awesome mog set. However the auction house is a very important tool used by all
kinds of players. Going through the forum comments, it looks like there were people
who actually watched on their phones as purchases were made on the auction house
from their account.
There is nothing conclusive stated from Blizzard that this is indeed a mobile armory
hack, but the evidence does point in that direction. At first it seemed that only a
few realms would see the mobile auction house shut down. Then, Bliz posted on their
Breaking News site that mobile auction house was down for emergency maintenance.
Now, it looks like it will be down for a prolonged period.
If it is indeed a mobile armory hack, what else can be done from the armory? Well,
everything you have that isn’t bound to your character could be sold, but that
doesn’t put all that much gold into potential gold sellers hands unless they hit
the jackpot with someone who hordes expensive items. Also, auctioning takes time
(minimum 12 hours) that hackers don’t have. They need to grab all the gold they can
before getting caught. The more likely situation is the continued purchasing of
cheap items for exorbitant amounts of your gold.
I’ll leave you with this: When I use the mobile armory auction house, it requires
me to automatically include an authenticator number. If someone has access to our
mobile armory, then do they potentially have access to our authenticators too?
