Security Breach at Blizzard - Hashed Passwords, Usernames, and Email Addresses Taken

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Just when you thought the days of game studios and websites being hacked was over comes this piece of news. Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Morhaime announced today that a security breach was discovered on its servers. The company moved to close it but not before email addresses, usernames, and hashed passwords were taken. Answers to the personal security question and information for Mobile and Dial-In Authenticators were also grabbed. The information loss affects those in North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, which is a pretty sizeable number of Battle.net users.

Blizzard uses Secure Remote Password protocols to protect the passwords, which is designed to be incredibly hard to crack. The hashed passwords will need to be deciphered individually due to the encryption, but even still the studio recommends North American B.net users change their passwords. Personal security questions will be changed in the next few days through an automated process. Mobile authenticator users will also be prompted to change their info in the next few days. Blizzard reminds everyone to be wary of any phishing emails and that it will never ask for any passwords.

At this time Blizzard does not believe any financial information was taken, but it is still conducting an investigation. Hopefully nothing was taken, but we will just have to wait and see.

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hornybluecow on August 9, 2012 05:16PM it's not so bad as it's told. They have the passwords so hashed that you have to decrypt each password manual. That would take forever. reply to this

PSyCHoHaMSTeRza on August 10, 2012 06:25AM I think the issue is more the security questions. Then they can just reset of retrieve a few passwords. With the answers to some hashed passwords, they might be able to crack the encryption. reply to this

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