Blizzard's Battle.net Hacked; Company Recommends All Users Change Their Passwords

For a couple of years I have been receiving e-mail from Blizzard telling me to update my account - although I do not have an account.

An investigation of your World of Warcraft account has found strong evidence that the account in question is being sold or traded ... you should immediately verify that you are the original owner of the account.

The IP address shows it came from Melbourne, Australia. Blizzard Entertainment is located in California.

doctor-don said:

For a couple of years I have been receiving e-mail from Blizzard telling me to update my account - although I do not have an account.

The IP address shows it came from Melbourne, Australia. Blizzard Entertainment is located in California.

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It's a phishing email. I get them all the time. They are trying to steal your account.

MTShipp said:

I have not received an email from them on this.

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Probably to avoid confusion with the spam messages you do get... No one would trust links in the email, lol

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Morod said:

"this is why I never play video games online!"

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How's your cave?


Really, you probably have an iPhone, Facebook account, several other social media accounts, and you are afraid of online games?

ArtOfWarfare said:

As far as why Diablo 3 requires a constant internet connection, even when playing single player: it's to prevent cheating. Because you use the same characters/items both in single player and on Battle.net, it's possible to indirectly cheat online by giving your character some crazy boosts in single player, and then taking him online in multiplayer. What's worse is they have the auction house, where real money is used in transactions. If you were permitted to cheat in single player, you could cause insanely good items to drop on your character, and then go online to the auction house and sell them for sad (stupidly high) amounts of money.

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Now, the only problem with that is that - especially with Diablo 3 - Blizzard destroyed this reason themselves. There was a bug that a mage could use until recently to make himself invincible. Tons of people then went and used this to farm items - especially on Hardcore mode. Auction house is skewed since. People used bots making about $1000 before they got banned... one wrote in the forums, dang, 4 of my bots got banned, but that's okay. I made $6k.
When I read about the Mage exploit, I stopped playing. The whole game is so full of flaws. I have played my monk unto Inferno's second act, but that's it for me. Maybe I should just sell my battlenet account... I got Diablo 3 CE on it only.

MH01 said:

I understand that fully, though I draw the line at StarCraft 2, Diablo 3 and Wow in the battlenet discussion since battlenet did not exist for the other titles. The previous titles were also created as excellent standalone games with adequate multiplayer.

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I'll agree with that for WarCraft II, but I think StarCraft's online multiplayer was excellent. WarCraft III I would also say had better online than single player.

And personally, I think StarCraft II nailed both single player and multiplayer.

But that wasn't why I'm quoting you. Blizzard's online services have always been referred to as Battle.net (except WoW? I think they started calling WoW Battle.net 2.0 or something like that...). Just check any of their promotional material from those games.

The thing I miss is spawn play. It was nice to own a single copy of the game and be able to legally copy it to all my other computers for house LAN parties. As a dev, I'm planning on including that same sort of feature whenever I finally finish a game with multiplayer.

Mad-B-One said:

Now, the only problem with that is that - especially with Diablo 3 - Blizzard destroyed this reason themselves. There was a bug that a mage could use until recently to make himself invincible. Tons of people then went and used this to farm items - especially on Hardcore mode. Auction house is skewed since. People used bots making about $1000 before they got banned... one wrote in the forums, dang, 4 of my bots got banned, but that's okay. I made $6k.
When I read about the Mage exploit, I stopped playing. The whole game is so full of flaws. I have played my monk unto Inferno's second act, but that's it for me. Maybe I should just sell my battlenet account... I got Diablo 3 CE on it only.

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Glad I wasn't very impressed with Diablo 2 so never got 3
(I vastly prefer my top-down games to be RTS, not click-em-ups.)

MH01 said:

You don't understand what a MMORPG is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online_role-playing_game

Sure remove the Massively multiplayer Online part and you back with RPG

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He said "even when not doing anything multiplayer-related?"

What MMORPG allows you to play singleplayer/offline? WoW definitely does not. I don't think you understand what an MMORPG is.

ArtOfWarfare said:

The thing I miss is spawn play. It was nice to own a single copy of the game and be able to legally copy it to all my other computers for house LAN parties. As a dev, I'm planning on including that same sort of feature whenever I finally finish a game with multiplayer.

Glad I wasn't very impressed with Diablo 2 so never got 3
(I vastly prefer my top-down games to be RTS, not click-em-ups.)

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Yea, I wasted $99 for the CE. I am back at World of Tanks. Their physics patch is coming (it's patch 8.0, look it up on YouTube, it looks awesome) and I won't go back to Blizzard's titles. If you want to see what I mean, click on my YouTube channel in my signature. Sadly, you have to install Windows on the Mac to play it - otherwise I could play with my father-in-law. The really funny part: World of Tanks is a Russian game. No one dares to hack them - actually, as successful as Wargaming is, they probably hired the best hackers (Kasperky left unhired). Also, I am a closed Beta player (since closed Alpha) for World of Warplanes. That one is awesome as well. Can't wait for World of Battleships...

In the beginning I used a completely different password for Battle.net than my other online accounts. The reason is because Blizzard REGULARLY gets hacked.

Then when the mobile authenticator came out, I started to use the same password -- which I change regularly.

This news has got me thinking again. I am definitely going to go back to using a different password with Blizzard and Battle.net.

They say some info on authenticators was stolen. Good thing I had mine disabled at the time. But I've reenabled mine now, so I think I'm good.

Still.. gotta change my password.

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doctor-don said:

For a couple of years I have been receiving e-mail from Blizzard telling me to update my account - although I do not have an account.

An investigation of your World of Warcraft account has found strong evidence that the account in question is being sold or traded ... you should immediately verify that you are the original owner of the account.

The IP address shows it came from Melbourne, Australia. Blizzard Entertainment is located in California.

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I got that as well. It's a phishing scam. I already alerted the REAL Blizzard about it and sent them the emails. There was another one too -- the free 10-day trial thing.

It's an elaborate scam. It actually modifies your WoW installation so when you log in (with your credentials and all) the client -- you actually get logged into a server that ISN'T Blizzard's. I know so because I found that no one else was online -- not even my friends, who were supposed to be online (I knew this by calling them).

Because of this, I wanted to separate my WoW account from my Starcraft II/Diablo 3 account...but it can't be done, according to Blizzard. Asshats. The only solution it seems, is to deactivate the WoW account entirely -- which means throwing away your rights to play it as well, after having shelled out so much for it. Pricks.

Gemütlichkeit said:

I'm waiting for the people to chime in here saying "this is why I never play video games online!"

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This is why I never play games online!! JK, but I do think if Blizzard made logging in more like Google's two-step authentication, this wouldn't matter.

As I understand it, right now a scammer could still break into your account but couldn't access your payment info if you're using Blizzard's current authenticator app. Google's way seems simpler and more effective.

this is why i never play games online.

j/k

note to myself: check my accounts and set different passwords for all of them...

Oh No..

Well doesn't this suck... I'm gonna change my password as soon as I get home. But why no email? I have to find this out through an article.

Icy1007 said:

Password Changed...just in case.

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This.

Not that my starcraft account is valuable in any way however

iSayuSay said:

Eat that, blizzard for not letting us play single Diablo III offline. What the heck with privacy these days?

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Since you have auction house access, you need to have your environment online. Otherwise a user could hack his system and upload locally-made counterfeit gear. The alternatives would be to have Blizzard come up with a secure way to certify gear items, or allow you to opt-out of on-line access pemanently.

Even if they had my password (which they don't really), they wouldn't really be able to get passed my authenticator.

It really should be a no-brainer to use different passwords for each account; unfortunately this isn't so practical due to having to remember them all. Check out Oplop for a way of generating strong(ish) unique passwords.

You provide it with a master password and an account alias, it combines the two and then hashes it to generate a random string to use as your account password. Then to retrieve the password the next time you want to log in you just enter your master password and alias and it'll generate the same password as before which you copy and paste to log in.

ConCat said:

Even if they had my password (which they don't really), they wouldn't really be able to get passed my authenticator.

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If the got the serial # for your authenticator then yea, they would. And for all we know that field in the database was in the same table as the usernames/passwords.

Steelgrave said:

If the got the serial # for your authenticator then yea, they would. And for all we know that field in the database was in the same table as the usernames/passwords.

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That isn't what the report says, so I assume not.

theanimaster said:

I
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I got that as well. It's a phishing scam. I already alerted the REAL Blizzard about it and sent them the emails. There was another one too -- the free 10-day trial thing.

It's an elaborate scam. It actually modifies your WoW installation so when you log in (with your credentials and all) the client -- you actually get logged into a server that ISN'T Blizzard's. I know so because I found that no one else was online -- not even my friends, who were supposed to be online (I knew this by calling them).

Because of this, I wanted to separate my WoW account from my Starcraft II/Diablo 3 account...but it can't be done, according to Blizzard. Asshats. The only solution it seems, is to deactivate the WoW account entirely -- which means throwing away your rights to play it as well, after having shelled out so much for it. Pricks.

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Yea its easy to do that and point it at a private server.

Those emails have always been around. Annoying but I always ignore anyway. Don't even look at emails about wow or diablo or from blizzard.

Jayse said:

One word: LOL

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That's not a word, it's an initialism, and it stands for three words.

How is this funny?

Gasu E. said:

Since you have auction house access, you need to have your environment online. Otherwise a user could hack his system and upload locally-made counterfeit gear. The alternatives would be to have Blizzard come up with a secure way to certify gear items, or allow you to opt-out of on-line access pemanently.

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Diablo II series has been a massive hits. It supports multiplayer, but it doesn't prevent anyone to finish the game in single player mode, which is great. Just notice people that they cannot use their offline profile for multiplayer sessions.

I understand now D3 has auction houses and need to protect their business with secure online connection. But not all people love to be connected all the time for a few reasons:

1. Not anybody has good enough connection to assure constant gateway for playing games. Not to mention a few hiccups on Blizzard side means the rest of earth clan cannot access the game.
   
2. Not anybody enjoy play games being watched and traced. Some people love cheats and exploits. So why not? As long as they do it on their own game session, not online. Have fun and do it at their own risk. Plain and simple.
   
3. Some just want to enjoy Diablo gameplay, battle and stories without being bothered by multiplayer features. Not everyone want "MMO" in their "RPG" games, which is the Diablo supposed to be, an adventure RPG.

iSayuSay said:

Diablo II series has been a massive hits. It supports multiplayer, but it doesn't prevent anyone to finish the game in single player mode, which is great. Just notice people that they cannot use their offline profile for multiplayer sessions.

I understand now D3 has auction houses and need to protect their business with secure online connection. But not all people love to be connected all the time for a few reasons:

1. Not anybody has good enough connection to assure constant gateway for playing games. Not to mention a few hiccups on Blizzard side means the rest of earth clan cannot access the game.
   
2. Not anybody enjoy play games being watched and traced. Some people love cheats and exploits. So why not? As long as they do it on their own game session, not online. Have fun and do it at their own risk. Plain and simple.
   
3. Some just want to enjoy Diablo gameplay, battle and stories without being bothered by multiplayer features. Not everyone want "MMO" in their "RPG" games, which is the Diablo supposed to be, an adventure RPG.

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Here's one play who wants to play just by himself. Especially since my internet connection absolutely SUCKS so there's no chance in hell that I'd ever be playing online! So why not just make characters for single player and multiplayer absolutely different from each other? Just as you can't move characters from one server to another?

henrikrox said:

I want to a delete all button on the internett for my info

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http://suicidemachine.org/

It's a shame blizzard was targeted. :/

They produce some of the best releases for OS X.

Great. Another service has been hacked that I use. So far Last.fm, LinkedIn and the Playstation Network have all been hacked and now Battle.net.

Good thing I spent a day changing all my passwords for every single web service I use so that they all have strong and unique passwords.

I have to admit that I expected more from Blizzard though.

I hope hackers destroy blizzard.