Back From Vacation + Hacking??

Hi everyone, I returned yesterday as promised, but since it was fairly late, I decided to save this post for today 🙂

I had a wonderful vacation with my family (I won’t reveal where I went for privacy reasons, sorry!) ^_^

Onto the second topic. I checked Facebook the other day, and I saw a lot of posts about people panicking over getting hacked

Since people on Fantage always misuse the word “hacking,” I wasn’t too worried at first; in the past, people have said they got “hacked” when they actually just gave their password away to untrustworthy people.

Hacking is difficult, and I doubt a professional hacker would spend time on a children’s website. But the fact that so many people were posting about it did worry me a bit.

I also got this email while I was away:

I couldn’t help but feel that it was maybe connected to all this hacking…!

The email above is from blogs.fantage@gmail.com. I responded to it “Do you think I’m stupid?” It’s obvious that this is not Fantage, for these reasons:

1. Fantage has their own email domain, like _____@fantage.com, they don’t use Gmail.

2. fantageville@gmail.com isn’t the email I used to sign up for Fantage. I joined in 2010, two years before I made Fantageville. If they wanted to contact me, they would have used the email they have in their system, which is my personal email.

3. The idiotic spelling errors. “Fantage has grossed 17%” and “Both of you are aloud to have…”

4. They just said “Fantage staff will never ask for your password” and then, in the next line RIGHT AFTER, they do. Wow?

5. Why would they need confirmation? They would just send it to my account. If they sent the email to the wrong person, it wouldn’t matter, they wouldn’t be able to get into my account anyway.

6. Fantage would never thank me, or anyone else, including the betas 😛

7. The obvious attempts to sound professional, when they are actually just stating blatantly obvious things, like “blog.fantage.com is connected to Fantage”

So, if you got this email, do NOT give them your username and password. Instead, send them this link maybe and/or give them a piece of your mind. If you have blogger friends who are well-known, send them to this too, I don’t want anyone losing their password because of this.

Just make sure you think before you give away your personal info. Fantage accounts aren’t worth much in the real world, but imagine if it was a person asking for your bank account? That could do some serious damage.

Also remember that no company that you sign up for (e.g. Facebook, Gmail, Fantage, etc.) will ask for your password through an email. The only place they will ask for it is on their actual website, to make sure it’s you. That’s the entire point of a password.

Stay safe!

I’ve thought about this some more, and I realized this.

If this “hacking generator,” which only requires a username, was real, then the high-levels would be the first ones hacked. I mean, their usernames are plastered in the Hall of Fame.

I’m 90% sure this was started either because (1) someone accidentally gave their password away, or (2) a wannabe-hacker started it to cause panic.

Either way, if you use common sense and value your privacy like me, you won’t be hacked.