Since a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, hackers have managed to discover a weak link in Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net service, where it was successfully hacked with scrambled passwords and email addresses being revealed to the culprits as part of the consequences. Law enforcement bodies have been been contacted, and it goes without saying that Blizzard has already responded by launching an investigation into this matter. The hackers have managed to retrieve email addresses for users located outside of China for Battle.net, where some of the affected regions include North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia.
In addition to email addresses, other compromised data include mobile and dial-in authenticators, in addition to cryptographically scrambled versions of the passwords that belong to players in North America. Blizzard has assured gamers that the compromised information is insufficient to Battle.net accounts, and they stated, “At this time, we’ve found no evidence that financial information such as credit cards, billing addresses, or real names were compromised. Our investigation is ongoing, but so far nothing suggests that these pieces of information have been accessed.”
Hopefully Blizzard is right on that account, although they have advised their North American gamers to perform a password change just to eliminate any possibility of an account compromise.