Life of a Death Knight, more exploits!
I have two Warcraft accounts. I took over the account of my buddy at work when he stopped playing a couple years ago. Another co-worker of mine shares this account with me as he uses it for “bank” characters that store his truckloads of various gear and raw materials he has amassed from his virtual MMORPG career. Well anyway, he went out at midnight on Wednesday to get the WoW expansion for both himself and for the account that we share. Since he bought it I felt obligated to install it. I did so. Since it was installed I figured I would make my Death Knight, a new class of player introduced with this expansion.
A Death Knight is different than other classes in the game, it is called a hero class. Typically when you start a new character you start at level 1 and have to progress from there. A Death Knight starts at level 55. The catch is you have to already have a character on the server that is already level 55 or higher in order to make a Death Knight.
Once the character is created you go through a chain of quests and events that are interesting, exciting, visually impressive and yes, a little disturbing. A Death Knight is not a nice guy. Many of the quests you are sent on involve you going into rooms of innocent civilians and slaughtering them as they scream for mercy. You pillage and plunder as your boss the Lich King commands you to do. The last part of the quest chain takes you into a monumental battle. However your forces lose the battle and your leader in the fight sees the error of his ways in the process. As a result your path turns from one of pure evil to one less severe as you become an enemy of the Lich King instead of a servant. The story line is really well done. So now I am at the point where I get to go unleash my Death Knight nastiness on the regular WoW world where you are only killing bad guys that deserve it.
Over the past week or two I had these mysterious anti-virus messages popping up both at home and work. It was complaining about some pdf file and claimed it had the bloodhound.196 exploit in it. My AV blocked it just fine but I would get the message regularly. It finally hit me that each time I was seeing the message it was while I was browsing one of my message boards. I did a search on bloodhound 196 and phpbb and found other message board operators complaining of similar problems.
Well of course I was alarmed and angry that once again I have been victim of some motherf’ing bot/individual that has been tinkering where it doesn’t belong. After some digging around I found that there was code appended to my board site description that was triggering this event. I removed it.
This latest compromise set me off on a unneeded message board killing frenzy. I had at least 6 phpbb message boards running on my web hosting. The majority of them were totally abandoned and saw no use. As far as I was concerned they were just taking up space and giving spammers/bots/exploiters just another target so I just hammered them all, f it. Now I only have two message boards active, one for the running club and one for my old WoW guild.
I really would like some definitive answers on how this bullshit goes down. My web host seems to totally dismiss the idea that there could be a root exploit on the server that is allowing assholes access to all of the accounts that reside there. Every time I try to get them to take some action to assist me in tracking down how this shit happens they blow it off. They assume that it occurs because I have some sort of key logger that is allowing people access to my account. That is not the case. It really pisses me off.
I am hearing little bits and pieces about this bail out bullshit that is pissing me off as well. I heard something about the possibility of some of that money being used to relieve credit card debt?? WTF? That is beyond ridiculous. You simply can not reward irresponsibility like that. The whole bail out fiasco has set a very shady precedent. Now everyone wants a hand out. “You did it for the banks, now what about us?” The auto industry already got help and wants ton more, supposedly the airline industry is lining up for a handout as well. The thing about the airlines are they actually are EXTREMELY profitable right now. They have outsourced and streamlined so much in recent years that they are making money hand over fist, especially now that jet fuel has plummeted in price. It doesn’t matter, they have their hand out. Who doesn’t want free money? The whole bail out deal stinks like road kill.
This weekend mom is coming over for her birthday. We are going to take her out to dinner and then her and Ali are going to go shopping Sunday. It will be nice to have mom come to our place, she is going to sleep over Saturday night. I have a few odd things to do around the house. It would be nice if I could get the last of the tree trimming finished up.