The internet and your computer communicate via data packets.

First of all, I want to clear up some lies that foolish people here have been telling you. First of all, accepting trades, party invites and chats is completely safe and you cannot be hacked as a result of it. The free market is safe and a great place to go to merchant. You are completely safe if you take the proper steps.

When you are a target for getting hacked, the hacker will do one of two things. One thing he may do is contact you somehow, and talk to you normally. He will seem nice, and you may know him for a few days if not weeks. This is what we call social engineering. That is the act of �playing� someone. The people you know on maple story that you do not know in real life, you do not really know them. All you know from them is what they tell you. You do not know if they want your password.

The other thing a hacker will do is wait for you to disconnect. If the hacker doesn�t want to try to get your password from you, he will try to key log you. I tell you the truth basilers, if you buy a computer and only have one program on it, maple story, you will never be hacked. If a website other then the official maple story website asks for any information, do not use the information you usually use.

So you people must be wondering how you get hacked, it is one of the two ways I listed above. If they can get to know you, they can play you until you like them and give them your info. They can also plant programs inside your computer to see what keys you press.

Here is another truth, the hacker cannot hack any account he wants to. If he did, the top 100 players would go down, he hacks the people that come to him. The top 100 players are the same as all of you; they do not have extra protection. If they can protect themselves then you can also.

Now I will explain how hacking works, and how you cannot hack someone from in game. To do that I need to explain how the program maple story works. To do that, I will explain how the internet works.

The internet and your computer communicate via data packets. Data packets are small pieces of data that contain information. These travel from one place to another. The maple story server and your computer send data packets back and forth. Each data packet has a header that tells where the data packet will go to. A hacker cannot re-direct these data packets to their computer, easily. You would need to give them a little something before they could do that, hackers are not Gods.

As I said before , maple story sends packets to your client and your client sends them back, when you log in with your username and password, the client sends the username and password to the server, that is the only time that the username and password are send between them.

One other player here on these forums claims that the hacker takes your player on screen, that is false. To do that, he would need to tell the server to stop accepting his clients packets for his character and start accepting them for the player that he wants to hack, basically impossible in programming as each player would have an object to themselves, but that�s just programming.

If the hackers gained access to the database, then they would be able to do whatever they want. The character data, account data and the notices/news/events on the maple story website are all in that database; they would do a lot more, and would hack better accounts.

Also, for databases, there is a neat feature that lets you only allow a connection from certain ip. You cannot change your ip to their ip because you need a unique ip to connect to the internet, technically.

Ok, so you think a lot of people are getting hacked, right? No, at the time that I made this thread, there were 34637 people online in global maple story. On max, you will only play for 5 hours a day at most, and over two 5 hour periods, it is reasonable to say that the number of players online would be steady, meaning around 70000 people play maple story. If you say that around 300 people got hacked so far, that is a 0.5% chance of you being hacked. I took into account the minimum people that play, not everyone plays every day. The 0.5% would be the minimum, I estimate to around 0.01% of the total population of 2009 to be hacked.

I am a computer programmer, I know my stuff. Please feel free to ask questions and I will provide the answers I know. The program I used to get the number of people online is legit, it acts as a client connecting to the server, sending the same packets, the server sends the amount of people online, I am fairly sure.
I have some theories about how you would be able to hack an account, but if Wizet has coded login properly, I see no possible way. Hacker, come get me, I dare you.