I’m so glad my 11-year-old son signed up for the incredibly popular online game World of Warcraft recently because now he can potentially be part of this worldwide hacking movement that all the cool kids are talking about! Hooray! (sigh).
Blizzard, which runs several well known online games, says it has been breached but that no credit card information seems to have been taken. At least not as far as they know. Yet. Still, the company is telling users to change their passwords. Blizzard announced this on the Battle.net site and said the hack seems to have occurred on August 4th. Geez, great job waiting a week on telling people about it, Blizzard.
From the BBC:
Battle.net is the overarching account management and login service gamers use to play Blizzard games including World of Warcraft, StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3.
Also accessed was information about the security questions and account authenticators used by players on North American servers. As well as players in the US and Canada this includes people in Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia.
The attackers also stole a cryptographically scrambled list of the passwords used on North American Battle.net accounts. The technique Blizzard used to conceal these passwords, said Mr Morhaime, made it hard to unscramble them.
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
