Monthly Security Report - August 2019
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Hello wonderful Capsuleers and welcome to the Monthly Security Report for August 2019, where we take a look over the month's activity against botting, RMT and account hacking.
Firstly the raw numbers for the month of August:
- 994 account bans for account hacking.
- 4,369 account bans for botting related activities.
- 2,454 account bans for RMT related activities.
These numbers represent account action taken between 2019/08/01 - 2019/09/01.
Current Focus
For the last month our focus has been on smashing several botting and RMT rings that have been reported to us by the community, as well as monitoring the behavior of suspected botters after the start of the blackout to see if and how the methods used are adapting to the changes that have been made.
We'll be very interested to see what level of impact there will be on botting activities with the release of the cynosural field changes with the September Release on Tuesday, as well as the Venture changes which we hope will have a substantial effect on lowsec faction warfare botting.
We can see by looking at the graph below that a combination of the blackout as well as a renewed focus on hammering these kinds of illicit behaviors into the ground have had a massive impact on the amount of ISK being poured into the economy of New Eden by suspected botters.
What Can You Do To Help?
We'll keep reinforcing this message and stressing it every month - DON'T RMT, AND DON'T GET INVOLVED WITH BOTTING.
The most responsible thing you can do as citizen of New Eden is to say something if you see this kind of activity in game.
Report it to us and we'll investigate and action it as soon as we can.
We will give those involved in botting and real money trading no quarter. Those who harbor these people and profit from it will be stripped of assets and ISK that are gained through illicit means.
By RMTing, or by harboring people who bot and RMT, you’re contributing to the real-life wallets of people who do not care about EVE, or our community. These are people who destroy the accounts of innocent players, in some instances causing irreparable damage to characters and shattering years of progress for legitimate players who play by the rules and just want to enjoy EVE.
Most importantly, if you see botting and RMT happening – REPORT IT.
While we don’t respond to every individual report of botting or RMT, they’re all taken 100% seriously, and are thoroughly investigated for credibility.
Aside from reporting botters and real money trading, the biggest help you can provide is not to give these scumbags any business.
Use Two Factor Authentication!
We cannot stress this enough – we know how much effort goes into character development in EVE Online, and it’s worth the extra login step to protect your accounts from abuse and damage.
Protect it all. Enable two factor authentication on all your EVE accounts, and on the email accounts that are verified against them.
Most hacking cases that we deal with don’t originate from a simple password breach on an EVE Online account – they occur when a player’s email account is hacked, and a password reset request is sent to the email address, which then gives access to your characters and assets.
You can help keep your accounts secure by using 2FA on both your email and your EVE Online account and reduce the risk of becoming a victim of account hacking.
For extra security, you can also make sure you use a mobile authentication token to keep code generation on your mobile device and away from your email accounts.
To make life a little easier, with recent changes it’s also now possible to use one authentication token linked to all your accounts. You can check out more about this change in this devblog, which was also linked earlier in this report.
Final Words:
We're super happy to see that the EVE community remains vigilant against botting for the best part. Keep the reports coming, and we'll keep rooting these guys out as quickly and efficiently as we can.
We remain 100% committed to keeping up the fight against botting, RMT and account hacking in New Eden, and we'll continue to hit these guys as hard as we can while looking at ways to deter them further as best we can.
It can't be stressed enough that while you don't recieve a lot of feedback on individual botting reports right now, every report matters.
