Online game opened Alberta mom's accounts to hackers

A Cochrane, Alta., mother is warning others after spending the last eight months trying to recover online accounts that were hacked after downloading a gaming app for her daughter.

Susanne Jarman's nine-year-old daughter asked to download Wolf Online 2 to her iPad.

"Her favourite thing in the world is animals, live animals, game animals, she loves to play app games," she said.

Her mother downloaded the game to her daughter's device from the Apple App Store in February but says she never would have expected the nightmare that followed shortly after installing it.

"As a protective mom I ended up downloading it onto my iPad as well and we would play together," she said.

The game is interactive and Jarman became suspicious of some of the other online gamers who would approach them online.

"There was a time where there was a screen sharing almost, my character dispersed and he was telling us 'don't move,'" explained Jarman.

"All of that added up to warning signs to me. I don't know a lot about computers, I don't know a lot about apps, but it was enough to trigger something."

She immediately deleted the game from her device and monitored her phone.

"I went into my notes folder just to see what was going on and there was a new shared folder that had all my financial files in it. So, I was like 'ok, they are definitely in my iCloud' and I didn’t know at that point it was beyond that, but it was enough for me to wipe both of my devices," she said.

Things snowballed from there. Jarman says the hackers changed her Apple ID username and password and broke into every account she had. She says it continues, despite constantly changing or creating new accounts, passwords, emails, etc.

"I've learnt anything you have on your devices is capable of being taken from you at one point," she said.

The hackers stole her banking information, tax information and other important documents, but she was devastated when she lost access to photos of her late husband.

Jarman says the whole situation has made her quite paranoid and says her family has been forced to operate without the Internet until she can resolve the continuous hacks.

"It is so hard to go back to the 1990s, people don't want to do that. You go to a place and they ask for your email address and I don't have one that's secure," she explained.

Garman wants to see the game removed from the Apple App Store.

"To know there are malicious hackers out there that are luring in kids by pretending to be a friend," she said.

"I don't want to see it happen to anyone else."

Apple says it is looking into the situation and encourages its users to review its guidelines on Apple ID and iCloud security.

CTV News has also reached out to the developers of Wolf Game 2 for comment but has not yet received a response.

'BE SUSPICIOUS': TECH EXPERT

Dr. Tom Keenan, a professor at the University of Calgary and the author of Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy, says that apps with malware are more common than people expect.

He says the risk of being hacked or having your online information compromised is greater with artificial intelligence and developing technologies.

"These processes can be automated, somebody can just launch a bot that goes out there and tries knocking on everybody's digital door and if it gets in it looks around," he said.

He encourages parents to be vigilant about the games and other applications their children are downloading and who they are interacting with on them.

"Be suspicious. Look over your kids' shoulders. Particularly if somebody is conversing with them," he said.

"We've had so many terrible examples of children being talked to by strangers and bad things happening. I think any game in which there is interaction, or a side channel, or something, the parent really needs to be in the room."

Keenan says it's important to store any private information or anything you wouldn't want someone to have access to off your computer or other devices and instead onto a USB stick or external hard drive.

"You should just assume that somebody, someday is going to get inside your computer," he said.

"If you have written the great Canadian novel or have the formula for Coca-Cola, don't put it up on the Cloud because the Cloud, like any other computer, can be hacked," he said.

He also wants people to know that photos have information attached to them digitally that can reveal private details to hackers, such as your home address.

"You're sort of leaving digital exhaust everywhere and you want to minimize that and one way to do that of course it keep things totally offline," he said.

Keenan encourages people to have strong passwords, to change them regularly and to install anti-malware software on devices.

However, he says even if you do everything right you may still find yourself a victim.

"I work with big companies and even they can get hacked and in really nasty ways. They lose hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes," he said.

"So, if those companies with big IT departments are being hacked, you’re a sitting duck."