During the afternoon, Patriot of WGTour posted a news warning about the Pro Gamers Tour and their homepage, claiming that they will steal your password. They also confirmed that they have banned all the PGTour administrators from their site. The reasons seem to be PGTour banning WGTour administrators first, and this came as a result. The reason stated in the news was, however, that WGTour found them to be copycats (more on this later).
Patriot informed us, SCLegacy and TeamLiquid about this matter and XG3 at SCLegacy published it on his site. Shortly after, a reply was submitted by Chr1s, where he denies the accusations and any involvement. Chr1s's words were not published in the WGTour news post.
Using the brute force program, WGTour now accuses Chr1s of a hacking attempt. WGTour published an extract from their logfile of the site, which - according to them - showed Chr1s attempting to log into Patriot's account more than 161,280 times with one second in between every try. A result which can not be done by a human, therefore the brute force accusations.
Whether this log is accurate or not is hard to tell, it could also be easily faked. Chr1s's response to the log file was to show his IP and saying that the one they published is the wrong one, quoting his ipconfig from windows. He also said that he does not have access to any passwords since they are encrypted in their database. To prove this, he also published a » screenshot from their MySQL database, confirming what he just said - the passwords are encrypted. GosuGamers use a similar system and my conclusion after watching the screen shot is that Chr1s is correct here and that he has no access to any passwords what so ever in their database.
WGTour still say they have enough "evidence" to be sure that this was a work of Cri1s's and blames the Pro Gamers Tour for the incident in their latest post.
How could it be done?
Brute force is a program (often called "bot" or "machine") which connects to a site and tries to log in to a specific account. It tests all possible passwords changing one character at the time over and over again. This will within a few hours give thousands of thousands login attemps, and it will continue until the password is found. This is also one of the reasons why Battle.net login service only gives you three tries for the password, for example.
All the statements in this conversation can be found at » SCLegacy's post about it.
Why blame the whole PGTour?
For the 'why'-reason, we have to go back in time for a while. The Pro Gamers Tour's website is basically built on the same idea as the World Game Tour is. It includes design and functions almost identical to WGTour, even if the administrators of the PGTour-site claim to have the best programming. Regardless - WGTour was clearly upset about the PGTour before this incident and tried to diss them in various news on their homepage. One example is when WGTour published their new "H"-symbol for hackers, they ended the news with a question about how long time it would take before PGTour would rip of the idea. Patriot claimed Chr1s for banning him from PGTour in the beginning and WGTour started to do the same - banning PGTour administrators. To make it short: they both disliked each other. In what way this affected the outcome of it all is hard to tell, but it has definitely something to do with it.
Conclusions and results
It seems to me obvious that PGTour do not have the access to any passwords, and WGTour making false accusations about something they (intentionally or unintentionally) were mistaken about. SCLegacy updated their news with the following statement:
"Update: We have word from the parties involved that this whole thing was in fact not an issue and Patriot (WGT) was completely wrong in his accusations. We expect official word, including an apology to Chr1s and PGTour, from WGTour's Skav shortly."
Also, the fact that WGTour just deleted their news (including 80+ comments) with the accusations, is another reason to believe that they were mistaken. Whether that is true or not, the question remains why WGTour chose to blame the whole PGTour site and threaten with a life time ban.
Patriot: "Anyone who is currently an admin on PGTour is advised to quit, any WGTour member that continues to administrate over this ladder will be banned forever on WGTour and will always have their name as being associated with a password thief / hacker. "
We have seen WGTour covering up for this kind of situation before - the World Dream Tour scandals - let's hope they've learnt from their mistakes and publish a final statement about it all. I will update this news with all necessary details as the incident evolves.
Links
SCLegacy.com - More information
PGTour.net - Two interesting posts about the matter
WGTour.com - Official homepage
