A Message to Blizzard - Blue Tracker

#0 - July 9, 2010, 3:49 a.m.

Greetings

Let me start off by saying I have been an avid Blizzard fan ever since I was a child, being a big fan of all their games back to the original Warcraft. Up until the past few months I've been nothing but impressed by the service that Blizzard has brought to the gaming community by providing endless entertainment without hassle.

However, as of late I have noticed some major problems with scammers/hackers/etc that I feel Blizzard has not dealt with properly. Recently, my World of Warcraft account was hacked. I do not know how this has happened, I run WoW on my MacBook, leaving little room for viruses/keyloggers. I never visit sites that are suspicious and I have never given my account information to anybody. It seems that I am not the only one in this situation, many others have recently had their account hacked and have had a authenticator placed on their account to prevent them from logging in. This leads me to believe that maybe Blizzard is responsible for the lack of account security. I know it's my responsibility to maintain my account safety, however I feel like there was nothing I could have done in this situation to prevent my account from being hacked.

I don't play WoW much to begin with, but I thought I would get back into it this summer as hobby. Losing all my characters isn't what I'm frustrated about, because I know they can be recovered (hopefully). I'm frustrated at Blizzard's lack of effort to stop the hackers. The phishing and e-mail scams have been flooding my e-mail inbox for the past few months, and I have not heard any news from Blizzard about making any progress to stop the hackers.

Due to the recent incident, I feel like I have lost some confidence in Blizzard. If they are unable to provide security for their users for the most popular game in the world, how will they manage to do so with the new release of Starcraft II and Diablo III?

I don't want to sound like I'm bashing Blizzard, but I feel like I have been let down by them. I am very grateful for all of the customer service that has been provided to me in the recent days, however this shouldn't have happened in the first place.

Thank You

#1 - July 9, 2010, 5:30 a.m.

We exert an enormous effort to both restore players that find themselves in this situation and educate players to prevent this from happening, SkÃ. Macs are not immune to viruses and the recent Adobe vulnerability was just as dangerous to Mac users as PC users. You didn't mention your email either - it's entirely possible that could be compromised.

Phishes are very rampant, but as we don't generate those, I'm a bit unsure what....short of education that we do our best to provide, we are supposed to be able to do about them.

If you have any recommendations you are always more than welcome to post them in the Suggestion Forum.

One reason we developed the authenticator was to give players another layer of defense. They aren't meant to replace any good security habits. Even the most cautious and tech savvy player can fall victim to a zero day vulnerability.