Blizzard Hacked, Emails and Secret Question Answers Stolen

[rebel1280]

[citation][nom]otacon72[/nom]Yes you can stop someone from gaining access to your network. It's called keeping your software updated and having skilled administrators. The company I work for handles wire transfers for large corporations and we've never had a breach. People try all day long but they get nowhere. Not patting myself on the back or anything but yes you can stop them if you're better than they are.[/citation]
Knock on wood man, if your connected to the internet, you ARE hackable. There is no way around it. Security was and is a catch up game, a game of defense. You cannot be better than hackers as they are always evolving and your security adapts to it not the other way around. All the firewalls, proxys, and honeypots were made to counter act hackers AFTER hacks not before. All it ever really takes is one (really stupid) guy with a USB stick and your done. If government agencies can be breached, i can guarantee your company can as well. But congrats on not being hacked, that in itself is well worth a pat on the back. Here is an excellent read ( a little old but still good)- http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2011/December/Pages/DefenseDepartmentPartnersWithIndustryToStemStaggeringCybertheftLosses.aspx

 

[spartanmk2]

My level 12 paladin NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Kami3k]

[citation][nom]kinggremlin[/nom]How difficult it was to get in isn't really relevant. They were still the victim of an illegal act. If someone accidently leaves their front door unlocked, that isn't justification for someone else to enter their house and rob them. Was leaving the door locked the owner's fault? Absolutely, but if someone really wanted to break into your house there is very little you could do stop them. A locked door will not stop a skilled thief. Same thing goes here, these companies may not have the most sophisticated security systems in place, but their is very little they can do to stop skilled hackers that are targetting them no matter what practical lengths they go through to secure their network.[/citation]

Except they were TOLD OF THE EXPLOIT AND REFUSED TO DO ANYTHING!

There is no accident involved. They were told that someone could easily gain access to their systems that way and they refused to pay a few 10,000 to get it fixed.

So again, why should I care about a corporation that was so stupid about security?

 

[robochump]

[citation][nom]schnitter[/nom]Oh wow, as if the e-mails "Your WoW account has been suspended, click this link to reactivate" weren't already rolling in (don't even play that game), now it will be worse.I only have Diablo III which I have not played in close to 2 months. They can keep it as I am done with Blizzard. Since Activision merged with Blizzard, they are as bad as EA.[/citation]

You guys that bash EA and Activision are hilarious. Sure they are not perfect but imagine the PC gaming segment without both of them?!? PC gaming would be dead. I rather have to deal with silly game issues than have no games at all.

 

[nukemaster]

Just tried it, apparently you never have. They are case sensitive.

Strange I logged into sc2 with my pass all caps all lower and every second upper/lower. And this was AFTER changing it.
But....here ya go
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePTGae5h6Wk

 

[jalek]

How difficult it was to get in isn't really relevant. They were still the victim of an illegal act. If someone accidently leaves their front door unlocked, that isn't justification for someone else to enter their house and rob them. Was leaving the door locked the owner's fault? Absolutely, but if someone really wanted to break into your house there is very little you could do stop them. A locked door will not stop a skilled thief. Same thing goes here, these companies may not have the most sophisticated security systems in place, but their is very little they can do to stop skilled hackers that are targetting them no matter what practical lengths they go through to secure their network.

They essentially had a sign in the yard, in spite of being the effective custodian of their user's information. Had they used just reasonable care, such as not storing bank information in a plain text file for years after they stopped using it, your defense might seem more justified.

They'd recently laid off IT people and hired another legal team, months after the unpatched servers were being talked about on various forums. After the fact, they hired some temps to patch the servers, which they very likely no longer employ, so any new exploits may or may not be patched. Corporate mentality probably has convinced them that attorneys will protect them with lawsuits.

Dealing with their game divisions now is like talking to a shoestring-budgeted company with an authoritarian in charge. The parent company still hasn't learned that a reputation for quality is something to protect even if it costs a few more cents per unit, not just take for granted in spite of bleeding billions quarterly.

 

[rantoc]

[citation][nom]john_4[/nom]The cloud is safe, it really is.[/citation]

The sarcasm is strong in that one!

 

[rantoc]

[citation][nom]robochump[/nom]You guys that bash EA and Activision are hilarious. Sure they are not perfect but imagine the PC gaming segment without both of them?!? PC gaming would be dead. I rather have to deal with silly game issues than have no games at all.[/citation]

What figures are you referring that too while claiming that? The Pc gamers purchase power will be about the same for years to come and if EA and Activision were both gone - It would leave that market open for publisher / studios who have new fresh ideas rather than milking everything until it dies or place all burden on the customers to the point the entertainment become more hassle than fun (excessive drm ect).

In either case i doubt that the PC gaming would die without them, far from it - My bet is that it would open up a new era with new inspired games rather than CoD 25 or Bf 25.

 

[wildkitten]

[citation][nom]robochump[/nom]You guys that bash EA and Activision are hilarious. Sure they are not perfect but imagine the PC gaming segment without both of them?!? PC gaming would be dead. I rather have to deal with silly game issues than have no games at all.[/citation]
Let's me imagine....

Oh yes, a SC2 with lan mode, no map store fiasco. A Diablo 3 with single player offline mode, no RMAH and a WoW where content comes out regular for the game, not the pet/mount store and the story that may actually take place in the game, not the novels. Maybe Guitar Hero would still be going strong. Activision Blizzard not screwing over Infinity Ward thus costing Vivendi tens of millions, possibly more.

As for EA, perhaps we would have had a successful SimCity 5, not a pathetic SimCity Societies. A Dragon Age 2 where more than 2 or 3 maps are used and you don't have to buy tons of DLC to felsh out the game to what it should have been on launch.

These are just a few examples. The reason ALL video gaming is in decline and headed towards anpther crash is because EA and Activision Blizzard has swallowed everyone up so they can battle each other with consumers caught in the middle. Remember, Bobby Kotick sees the gamer as a resource, not as a customer. What he sees as customers is Activision Blizzard's 3rd party partners.

 

[bad_student]

reason #538 that requiring players to give a real name and address is utter stupidity.
Real ID is trash, and I never doubted that they'd let this information be "breached".

Facebook and other social sites do the same thing ever couple of years when they don't outright sell the personal information or build fbi backdoors.

 

[f-14]

information relating to Mobile and Dial-In Authenticators were also accessed. Based on what we currently know, this information alone is NOT enough for anyone to gain access to Battle.net accounts.

In addition to the emails and secret question answers, Blizzard states that cryptographically scrambled Battle.net passwords were also taken. But the company says Battle.net passwords feature an additional layer of security using Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP), making it difficult for hackers to extract the actual passwords without having to decipher each password individually.

well thanks to the cloud this can easily be achieved in minutes.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wireless-security-hack,2981-10.html
end of the 7th paragraph down on page 10

even though we need about 10 Radeon HD 6990s split among three desktop systems to reach 1 million WPA passwords per second, we can do the same by spending $60 to rent 20 Cluster GPU Instances (the limit was recently increased to 64 servers). The only hurdle is optimizing code in Amazon's cloud. And no, we aren't going to share our code.

 

[eddieroolz]

There'll always be loopholes, but Blizzard needs to take it extra serious after this round of hacking.