14 DAY TRIAL // A couple of months ago, Bungie Games was awarding a Halo 3 Recon Armor to one Halo 3 gamer who, incredibly managed to kill himself in a number of ways. That very same gamer has since reported not one, not two, but a total of three hijacks of his LIVE account, with the most recent occurring on December 29th, when he suddenly found himself logged out of his Xbox Live account, and rendered armoreless.
theregister.co.uk's posts: "Hackers have hijacked the Xbox Live account of a celebrity gamer and made off with a prized piece of virtual armor in a brazen act that suggests the online Microsoft service still puts the security of its users at risk."
Colin Fogle is the gamer (now a celebrity among Halo 3 players) who, by posting a video showing it was possible for a player to shoot and kill himself with his own sniper rifle, got Bungie Studios to hand him a Recon armor, something every Halo fan longs for.
It wasn't long before an evil mind tried and succeeded hacking Colin's account, stealing his password and implicitly his credit card number, home addresses and other credentials: "With this kind of information, they can steal much bigger things than my virtual armor," Fogle says. "If somebody doesn't like you, anyone can do this. The thing that upsets me the most is that, as we looked into this more and more, we saw how easy it is."
So not only is it fairly possible for everyone to experience something like this, but the way to do it is actually paved with signs. The same source mentions a Kevin Finisterre, security researcher and Xbox Live member, who has carried on an investigation on the same issue, following a hijack of his girlfriend's own account. How did it happpen? Well, the pair reportedly accused their online opponents of cheating. The cheaters' reply, according to Finisterre...: "Shut up or I'll steal your Xbox Live account." Finisterre claims that "about eight hours later, [he] wasn't able to log into [his] girlfriend's account."
8 hours and you no longer exist on Xbox LIVE...
Thieves unsurprisingly bragged over forums of their "feat," as Fogle and Finisterre both claim. All the hackers did was assemble enough information about an account to convince a support person they are the rightful owners of that respective account.
Xbox Live management once implemented changes and stopped the abuse, for a while, but the account hacking still goes on to this day. As you can imagine, there's a Halo 3 player out there proudly wearing a stolen Recon armor as we speak.