More From Greg “Fossilman” Raymer About Account Hacking

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Greg Raymer said something else interesting this morning about account hacking. (Read the initial episode about Raymer.)

There are two major types of hackers, referred to by PS security as malicious and joy-rider. The malicious types do what this jerk did, they try to get all of your money into their own account to steal it. When this happens, and the person is caught before the money leaves PS, then it is easy enough for PS to freeze the account, do their internal paperwork, and then put the money back into your account.

The joy rider types hack your account, and then they play big games against other players using your money. They lose to innocent third parties. Once this type of hacking is discovered, your money is gone, because PS isn’t going to take it away from the innocent third parties who were just fairly playing the available games. And if it was your account that was hacked, not PS computers or software, then they won’t repay you out of their own funds for money lost due to somebody guessing or stealing your password.

As far as I know, that is why I got my money back, and some other people have been hacked and permanently lost their money.

To be honest, it never occurred to me before that people would “joy ride” hacked accounts like that, but it makes sense. If the hackers were sophisticated, they would “maliciously joy ride” by joining a game with several co-conspirators and losing the money to them in a way that looks innocent.

I think I’m going to change the passwords for all my online banking today.

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