WoW Account Hacked - Haven't played in nearly a year - questions

The question is how. My wife and I both had our accounts hacked recently. We stopped playing last summer. WoW hasn't even been on a computer in the house in several months. I couldn't have gotten keylogged for it because there was nothing to keylog.

Problem is, Battle.net requirement wasn't in place before we left and now to do anything to our account we have to log in with Battle.net. We don't have a Battle.net account and the servers are down anyway. Call volume is apparently so high they aren't enough putting people in a queue.

But more to the point... How? Seriously... I keep very secure anyway, but how does someone steal my login to a game that's not even installed that I haven't played in at least 8 months?

Brute force, perhaps? Keep hitting the log in screen with a brute force program and eventually you'll get a hit. This time yours was one of the victims. Most likely they transferred all of your gear to another character to sell or sold your character off to someone else.

What are the odds that a brute force hack would catch me and my wife simultaneously though?

Another possibility is someone had a packet sniffer running on your internet connection, your ISP's connection, WoW's connection, etc... and they picked up your and your wife's log in information. They can then keep sniffing and see when people log in. The fact that you haven't logged in in a long time tells them that you won't notice them hacking your account, thus they did.

Either way, I think someone managed to get some information a while ago and purposely waited for you, and anyone else whom they have their credentials, to become inactive so you wouldn't notice you were being "WoW robbed".