Over this past weekend Diablo III players were lighting up the forums with more issues about the game, though these weren’t your run-of-the-mill server issues. According to the messages, tons of players were chiming in claiming that all of their gold and items had disappeared. After conducting some research, it looks like some players’ accounts were hacked, which caused the major issue.

Diablo III servers did go offline for a bit over the weekend, spanning up to a four-hour outage in some areas. Some rumors have spread about the outage being a result of a SQL injection attack, though this theory is unconfirmed as of right now. Some of the theories on the forums suggest that the session identifiers were hacked, allowing hackers to take over any account without alerting Blizzard’s authentication server. Though the developer does offer Authenticators, accounts using them have fell victim to the attack as well.

There’s no pinpointed cause to the attack, but Blizzard is working to address the situation. Many players have been left with nothing, having all of their rare items and personal stashes wiped totally clean. Could this be an actual hack? Was it a bug result of server maintenance? Right now we don’t know, and we’re waiting for Blizzard to issue a statement. Were you one of the victims of the attack?

Sometimes, people get curious about what’s in store for a game. Now, most people might just turn to the web, sifting through tons of so-called “true” rumors about what some new DLC might contain. If you’re like Karellan, from the BethSoft forums, however, you might actually try your hand at deciphering code in game to see what’s there.

Using a utility called strings.exe, Karellan found out some interesting things about what the next DLC may contain. Many of the files he found had a prefix stating DLC01. This seems to show that Bethesda is starting to upload a few of the DLC files into the game ahead of time. The file names themselves tell the full story about what’s in store. It looks like the DLC is going to contain snow elves, including the snow elf prince. Also included in the DLC are changes to the animation of how vampires feed, and crossbows, which have not made it into the game as of yet. Lastly, there seems to be a set of files that are all prefixed with RF, and the files all seem to be conversation files. It has been guessed by some people that it’s for a new follower, but there’s no way to be sure.

It’ll be interesting to see more of the history of the snow elves in the game, and what happened to them. In game lore, snow elves were driven out by the Nords, who then proceeded to seek refuge with the dwemer. However, the dwemer betrayed them, and the snow elves were enslaved. After the dwemer died out, the snow elves were twisted, and were left as blind, shattered husks called of the great people they once were. They became the falmer. Will this new DLC contain their revenge and their return to glory?

In the years that I’ve been going to different LAN events, big and small, I’ve seen my fair share of screens. People will come in with dinky 15 inch monitors, and I’ll silently laugh at them on the inside as I bask in the glory that is my 23 inch flat screen. However, even that good sized 23 inch monitor is just dwarfed by what some students at MIT have done.

Students at MIT managed to recreate the game of Tetris on the side of the Green Building. The resolution is only 9 pixels by 18 pixels, but it stands at a huge 295 feet tall, perfect for such a simple, yet addictive game. If you’re wondering how they’ve been able to make the different colors appear, it’s pretty simple. Color LEDs were installed in every window, allowing for the different Tetris pieces to be made with the different windows.

This isn’t the first time that the building has been used for such a hack. In September of 2011, LED lights were installed and on September 11th a waving American flag was displayed in remembrance of the 9/11 attacks. The next day, on September 12th, a game of Tetris was displayed, though due to glitches by September 13th the LED’s were removed. It appears, though, to be working again! Now, if only they could somehow program in the classic Tetris music…

Remember last November when Steam was hacked? At the time, when Gabe Newell addressed everyone, he let us know that there wasn’t any evidence that credit card information was stolen. However, after further investigation, he has given us reason to worry, just a little.

In a statement released earlier today, Gabe stated that “Recently we learned that it is probable that the intruders obtained a copy of a backup file with information about Steam transactions between 2004 and 2008. This backup file contained user names, email addresses, encrypted billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. It did not include Steam passwords.”

This doesn’t mean that they did get this information, as there is still no evidence to support that. However, Valve wants us to know that it is possible that the intruders could have obtained this backup. It’s still a very good idea to keep a very close eye on your credit card statements. Though, since the information is so old, it’s likely that the information that could have been obtained by hackers is useless to them.

Trion World, the developer behind the Rift MMO, has been sending emails to subscribers making them aware that accounts for the MMO have been compromised. Of course, they were attacked by “unauthorized intruders,” who remain unknown at this time.

Trion claims that “there is no evidence, and we have no reason to believe, that full credit card information was accessed or compromised in any way,” but that’s no reason not to take precaution. Just to be safe, the developer has reset all user passwords.

The post on the developer’s official site also lets players know that while they are investigating the issue, players should “have continued, uninterrupted access to Rift, and we do not anticipate any disruptions to your playing time.” Players will be getting three free days of play time for the issue, and a special item that increases their looted coin collection by 10%. We’ll have more on the issue as details come up.

Following a hack on their internal servers, Square Enix has taken down the official Square Enix Members site. This means players won’t be able to register any of the company’s products for prizes, edit profile information, or anything else dealing with the site’s services.  Both the US and Japan regions have been taken offline temporarily.

“We are assessing the full extent of this potential breach to determine what data, if any, was compromised and will provide more details as soon as possible. While some personal information may have been accessed, we can confirm that there is no possibility of any credit card information leak from this incident, since the server in question stores no credit card information,” as was issued in an official statement from the company.

Looks like credit card information is safe, so no worries there. What the hackers may have obtained is player library lists and emails. While this information can’t be too harmful, it’s still information lost. As Square details more about the situation, we’ll keep you posted.

In the last year, Sony has caught a lot of flack over a few major hacks that left people locked out of their network, and worse, with their personal information exposed. Of course, Sony isn’t the only company to see this sort of intrusion. Recently, Valve found themselves under attack, and their forums defaced.

The attack came just hours before one of the biggest launches of the year, Skyrim. Since the game requires Steam for authentication, this left users worried that there might be issues with the launch. Thankfully, this was not the case. For those of you who may not have had the luxury of activating your copy at midnight, you should encounter no problems, whatsoever. However, if you’re wanting to get on the Steam forums to discuss the game, or anything else, you’re out of luck. Valve head honcho, Gabe Newell addressed the concerns in the message below:

Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users:

Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.

We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.

We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.

While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.

We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.

We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.

I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

Gabe.

I definitely want to applaud Valve for their response to this issue. They made a swift response to the hack by not only taking the forums offline, but also by addressing the community and letting them know exactly what happened, and what actions they are taking. While it’s sad that it happened, and we certainly hope they find and patch the vulnerability that allowed this to happen in the first place, it’s good to see that no real harm appears to have taken place. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to go change your password.

A lot of Battlefield 3 players have been pretty upset by the fact that in order to play the game on their PC, they must install EA’s Origin client. After all, most people already use Steam, and don’t feel like loading down their computer with yet another piece of software that does little more than simply allow you to play a game. And since the game is only available on Origin, you have no choice but to download it. Or do you?

A group by the name of Razor1911 has released a piece of software that will allow you to completely bypass Origin altogether. That’s right, after unpacking the files found here, you’ll need only move the Battlefield .exe file to the folder, and double-click. The game will fire up immediately, without so much as opening Origin.

This does leave us with a few questions. The first being whether or not EA has the capability to find out if you are running Origin, and penalize you for bypassing it. Another is whether being forced to use Origin is any worse than being forced to use Steam for various games. Personally, I don’t like being forced to use any extra software that isn’t truly necessary. Valve has just done a good enough job with Steam that given the choice, I’d prefer to use it, rather than not. And that’s exactly what EA needs to do if they want people to get on board with Origin. Make it useful and unobtrusive enough that people actually want to use it. At least now, thanks to Razor1911, you have a choice.

DICE’s newest release is still very very young, but already very very vulnerable to people trying to cut corners any way they can.  Luckily, this recent glitch has been accidentally discovered by someone who does not want to release it to the public for the sake of the game.  This guy stumbled upon a glitch that makes him invulnerable to almost any attack and was able to successfully recreate the glitch in another game.

There’s no news of how this is done (and I wouldn’t include instructions in my writing anyways) and it will remain that way unless DICE fixes it.  He has contacted the game developer and let them in on the game’s threatening glitch, but he says if they fail to come up with a fix in a decent amount of time he will release the glitch to the public and force DICE to fix it.  I think that is the right decision by this guy and I commend him for it.

The glitch is pretty insane as you can see in the video below.  He says, “The only way you can die from this glitch is if you get shot by a shotgun, other than that you become immortal, you can survive any other type of bullet, explosive, and melee.  There will be no tutorial released to keep the game safe, however it has been reported to the developers, for a patch.”  Hopefully this is a one time fluke and nothing like this pops up in the future!

Reports are coming in that Battlefield 3 is already filled with hackers.  You guys on consoles are safe, though, since this only pertains to the PC version.  There have been tons upon tons of reports about these evil hackers, but I’ve only witnessed one in my 14.5 total hours of play time.

The only hacker I saw was using a pretty obvious aimbot to get up to about 100 kills in one single match.  This was pretty unnerving, but I stayed to verify that he was, in fact, hacking and to also see if any justice would be served by any admins.  Sadly, there weren’t any admins on at this time so he kept his reign until the end of the game.  Keep in mind, this was only one person in one server out of the total 76 matches I’ve played so far.  So there are hackers already, but they are few and far between.

Don’t fret too much, though.  DICE will surely kick it into gear on kicking these hackers’ butts.  I’m also sure PunkBuster will work together with DICE to fine tune the security measures when it comes to identifying and banning hackers in a quick manner.  I’m just happy that I haven’t seen any hacks like the one in the video below.  That hack was an exploit that took place during the beta.