Top RuneScape Player Falls Victim to Account Takeover; Attackers Changes Name to 'SamePwEvrywr'

A well-known RuneScape player in the MMO's gaming community found himself locked out of all accounts, and the user name changed to 'SamePwEvrywr.'

Such events rarely come to the surface, even though account takeovers occur every day, usually involving gaming or social media accounts. This situation is noteworthy because RuneScape is a massively multiplayer online game launched in 2001 (with a modern version re-released in 2013), and one of the most skilled players suffered such a loss.

The top players in the RuneScape community achieve a level of renown, usually by devoting endless hours to the game. The player named Diddeboy logged an average of six hours a day, every day, for the past ten years. Unfortunately, while he's well-known, the community didn't seem to enjoy some of his past behavior.

Diddeboy took to Twitter to complain to the game developers that he was locked out of the game and had no way to get his account back.

"My mail and osrs acc (Diddeboy1) was compromised (hacked?) With changed passwords. Cant recover Diddeboy1's password so trying here," said the player on Twitter. "I have Authenticator. Got logged out while i was playing and just thought id have to fill auth but pass was wrong."

According to a GamesRadar report, the same hacker also managed to temporarily take over Diddeboy's Twitter account. The hacker said the player used the same passwords on all his online platforms and never used two-factor authentication.

It's still unclear if the developers managed to help him in any way, as there's no activity on his Twitter account, and the official ranking of the game still lists "SamePwEvrywr" as the highest skillers in RuneScape.

If nothing else, the lesson should be clear: use unique passwords for each online account and set up multi-factor authentication on any service that supports it.