World of Warcraft's Brand New Rootkit

Captain Kirk writes "We all know that World of Warcraft has checked for hacks to ensure a safe game environment for all players. The latest version of these checks goes beyond anything seen so far in that what is being checked is now completely encrypted. Obviously this hits bot writers as can be seen from these complaints, But it also strikes at the privacy of all users. Now Blizzard has a tool that is encrypted and can run any type of scan, transfer any file or edit any document on your computer. That can't be right."

Comments

Re:Recommendation for online gaming

[ByOhTek]

wow works great in Wine.

use a very restricted account when running it in wine. Problem solved.

Re:What is worse?

[Cheesey]

Steam games have "Valve Anti-Cheat" (VAC), which is similar in principle to the Blizzard Warden. Other games use Punkbuster, which uses the same strategy to detect cheats. All of these programs scan your machine's memory and look for the signatures of known cheats. The mechanism used to carry out the scanning and report the results is deliberately obfuscated to make it difficult to reverse engineer the process and send fake results. All three of these programs are spyware. But you agree to the use of each within the EULA of whatever game you are playing.

Warden has always had the ability to be updated with arbitrary code as you play. The observations of this article are nothing new: Blizzard has always been able to access files on your computer, just by sending the appropriate program to Warden. It seems that they have recently been sending more complex programs, generated for each client, so the current generation of programs that spy on Warden no longer work. The arms race continues.