A hacker recently broke into my computer and deleted some of my blueprints as well as move some of my files around, just giving you a warning that hacker scumbags are targeting indie devs, the game was only in the early stages but they wrecked it, they deleted my pawn’s anim blueprint ( which was huge ) and they also deleted my katana blueprint, what a bloody scumbag, I hope this doesn’t happen to any of you guys, Please reply if your having a similar problem. and if your thinking it was a bug I highly doubt it, two blueprints deleted, someone on answerhub said it was highly unlikely that unreal did it. plus copies of animations in a folder that I never put them in, there was even a base ref pose animation that never bloody existed before, they are scum. I used to think hackers were great, big fan of the matrix and all that, thought they were like cyber heroes standing up for people, but they’re just bloody scum, my advice get some good anti virus, only go on the net when you have to, or keep your work on a separate computer, again hope this doesn’t happen to anyone else, It happened just when I got the game running really well too, so I’m totally ****** off.
Were you running any antivirus at all? This scares me…
Which antivirus is the best? Im running the free avast and spybot, but I never feel secure, Not sure which ones are the best for stopping people from going into your files and seeing what your doing.
Isn’t there some sites that sell ‘crypters’ to make programs undetected by every virus scanner guarenteed? I don’t even know if its possible to be safe if you download stuff off the net
Sorry for your loss, the lesson? Keep a backup of the project and copy paste it to an external drive everytime you go to sleep?
after working several years on various projects i learned the hard way that making a save copy to an external drive (one that is not always connected to your computer) is a great way to save you hours, if not months of work…
you never know what could happen. virus, hackers, harddrive damage, drunken self, evil twin etc… just make a copy of your work on an external harddrive
I doubt you were hacked, most likely a bug in the program deleted some stuff.
Also, antivirus is not a defense against hackers
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antivirus is not a defense against hackers
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Is there anything we can do at all? I download alot of stuff and its hard to buy an extra pc to have an offline workstation separate
I don’t know what we can do about it, except for try to minimize the amount of time your online, and keep antivirus updated plus external copy, its twisted and it was more than likely a hacker, I know I didn’t delete those files, and how do you explain the files that mysteriously appeared in another folder, they even altered some of my animations, I had a swordstance strafe left/right animation and it’s cut in half and doesn’t play properly. it makes sense that it was a hacker, I uploaded a video update to and the hacker must have liked what he saw. whats scary is I posted a video on these forums, so I wonder if it was someone here who did the hack? maybe there is a wolf among us, stealing our code. all I can say is whoever he/she is they aren’t even a good hacker because they left evidence ( the copied files ), either someone wanted to steal my code and use it in their own project or the hacker was doing out of spite for some reason, I don’t know but I’m very ****** off. I’ve been messing around with my anim blueprint to try and fix it but I can’t remember how I did it the first time and it was set up in a specific way. the only good thing about it is that he/she didn’t destroy the whole thing, it’s repairable if I can figure out how I did it the first time.
Sorry but putting it bluntly here it sounds more like you did a mistake rather than a hacker actually aiming at you. This is the first time i’ve read something like that.
You might be right, There is always the first time but i doubt it. And i hope this is a user mistake for all of our sakes.
Best of luck.
I don’t want to come off as an *** but this is not the work of a “hacker”. You sound like my grandmother.
“try to minimize the amount of time your online”
This is the most absurd thing I’ve ever read in this forum.
No hacker will sit down and try to track down a random person like you and put in the effort to “hack” you just to mess up a few blueprints in UE.
You have nothing to worry about.
“Hacking” someone isn’t just searching for your username and connecting. It would be really hard to access your computer unless you did something like posting very specific information online.
Either someone in your house accessed your computer.
Or you have a wifi without password that someone close to your network just logged onto.
Or you use some remote desktop software and somehow posted connection information.
Or the files just became corrupt by some other reason. Which isn’t uncommon when working with this kind of stuff.
All those explanations are far more likely than some random person “hacking” your computer.
Furthermore, make backups on separate drives, or even better on some cloud server.
Do you live with some prankster that can access your computer? Like younger brother, or dad. It looks more like somebody who had access tried to close unreal and did not saved files, or opened them in explorer and drag to random folders. Some years ago ****** of my friend wanted to play solitaire, instead running it, she dragged system32 folder to desktop. Luckily windows copies that instead of moving. So somebody could try to do something on your computer, failed, and does not admit now.
Do you have by any chance TightVNC with weak password installed on your pc?
Last weekend i reformatted the whole drive and reinstalled windows. Didnt even had to create backups, as all my stuff that its worth something its on different servers on the “cloud”, i have stuffs in bitbucket, private git, google drive, and dropbox. That way i dont lose a single line of code i dont want to lose, and i still keep all the code ive done last few years. You should use version control and create different backups on several places, so you wont have a problem (i know one of the cloud stuff can explode, but i already have it on the PC, so i can just upload it somewhere else)
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Is there anything we can do at all? I download alot of stuff and its hard to buy an extra pc to have an offline workstation separate
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Hacking isn’t much of a concern unless you have something that a hacker wants or you made someone angry, otherwise it’s not worth the effort to hack random people. Firewalls are what can try to prevent people from accessing your computer, and Windows has some stuff built in. Viruses are pretty easy to avoid, the antivirus software you can get for free with Windows is actually pretty good. If you end up at a state where you have some actual valuable stuff that people know you have, then you’d want to consider more security measures.
If anyone did that to you, then that’s based on you, not on the general indie community.
Either someone got access to the computer physically, or they got access to the computer through remote access (if you have bad firewall and passwords.)
Or, more likely, you did something wrong, but you didn’t realize what it was at the time, and now “hackers” seems the most logical explanation.
It probably feels pretty ****** for you – kind of like someone whose home gets vandalized. Someone broke in, smashed the flower pots, and emptied the aquarium on the floor – that feels ****** too. That means there’s bad people in the world, but probably doesn’t mean that there’s someone out to vandalize every house that’s green, or whatever.
More likely, it’s someone who for some reason wants to screw with me or doesn’t like me.
What should you do? You should set up an offsite source control solution.
Either use a free, public, system like github, or pay the $6/month for some virtual private server with a shell that you can git push to using SSH. interserver.net has a good option; digital ocean, dreamhost, rackspace.net, LiNode, or aws.amazon are other options, slightly more expensive.
Every day, you should “git add -a” and “git commit -m awesomestuff” and “git push”
That way, if something happens to your computer, you have all the files you need in at least one other location.
You should do this for your Documents folder, and your editor settings, and anything else you care about – there are so many ways to lose data!
- your house could burn down, taking the computer with it
- you could get too drunk and accidentally the everything
- the hard disk could fail
- russian mobsters could install ransomware that encrypts your hard disk and requires a thousand dollars ransom
- you could realize that you took a wrong turn, and the version you had two days ago was much better
A solid version control practice will save you from all of those problems, and more!
can’t judge, but I tell you it’s a high chance nobody ever though about hacking you. If you had something valuable lost then you could say they had targeted it. But deleting Blueprints, moving files around and such isn’t something a hacker would put time and effort to do so.
If you are after a security software, I have KIS and I’m happy with it. It notifies me whenever it blocks a possible hack, key logger, etc etc. The protection is strong compared to whatever other security software I have used.
Hope that helps. 
Use free two user account atwww.fogcreek/kiln/, it supports mercurial with large file support and unlimited space (they limit the number of users, but for 2 it’s completely free of charge :D).
A hacker who is into blueprinting in UE4? lol
The chances a “hacker” found your pawn blueprints are ZERO.
In a real case a hacker would erase all your drives.
I believe this thread run it’s course 
Hi ,
As long as the conversation remains civil we will not close the thread. Please continue the discussion if you want to, please remember, however, to be polite and professional. Thank you.
It’s always possible that it was a hacker 
Do you probably have friends or a brother/sister which is interested in programming? Testing hacking skills on a “real” target is the best practice -> you dont know how often my brother tested some stuff with my PC without that I knew it 
Btw, download “super anti spyware” and start a scan -> this program finds nearly every trojan/maleware/… 
I created a thread yesterday that would work perfectly in this circumstance. If you have your own shared host, dedicated server, or VPS and you don’t feel like shelling out extra on a Prem Dropbox/Drive account consider Owncloud.org. Does the same thing as dropbox, but you host it yourself and set the storage quota. No more having to worry about the limits imposed by commercial cloud services and you control the security levels and if you want even more security you could even toss it behind a VPN.
Just a thought. Your disk’s are intact:-
://www.runtime.org/
If it works then take the nessacery procautions, get a gdrive account (15GB free). Can’t put a price on data.