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Blizzard Introduces One-Time Password Devices For WoW

Posted by timothy on from the status-symbols dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Two days ago Blizzard announced that they will be selling keychain tokens to add one-time password support (FAQ) to World of Warcraft. Have compromised World of Warcraft accounts become such a serious problem, that OTPs are already neccesary for games?"

2 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Other Authentication by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was listening to The Instance, which is a WoW podcast and one of their topics concerned Taiwanese WoW players. They had the option to sign up for a different type of secondary authentication which required them to register 3 different phone numbers. You couldn't completely log in unless Blizzard received a call from one of said phone numbers.

    Considering the amount of time people have devoted into these accounts, I don't see this being that big of a deal. As a player, I'm not too sure I'd get one, as I try to avoid random websites, certain browsers and suspiscious addons. The current belief now, however, is that people cracking into wow accounts are using more brute force methods instead of trojan/spyware etc etc (but it's not like those have completely disappeared.)

    There's nothing wrong with a little extra security, especially when you've played for 3 years.

  2. Also by Konster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can imagine that the problem of hacked accounts is *huge* and primarily a problem on the user's end. I'd wager a guess that Blizzard's largest demographic sometimes also engages in P2P/Warez in conjunction with poor security habits. Trojan-laden warez, account sharing, piss-poor passwords and wide-open PC's; users leave themselves wide open to getting their virtual goodies ransacked and run off with.

    I played WoW for 4 months a few years ago and was surprised at the number of trojans packed in the executable installers of some popular UI mods.It wasn't a very clever(but it was effective)way of farming usernames and passwords. Considering the global reach and sheer numbers of people playing WoW, and the virtual goods for real life cash trade, I wouldn't be surprised to learn about WoW-specific trojans running around in the wild. Some people make it easy for the bad guys; using the same login details on WoW related forums as their actual wow account, to purchasing gold and other items from shady websites (good way of farming cc numbers, shady websites also use cc info to pay for their own account time, leading to charge backs and other hassles)to just flat out sharing their details willy-nilly with anyone half trusting.

    And there's no evil in Blizzard charging two cups of coffee for an extra layer of protection. I'm sure they've spent oodles and oodles of cash in the past dealing with these issues, so there's nothing wrong with recouping past costs and helping to avoid a portion of future expenditures.

    I would appreciate separate user names and passwords for account management and character login, too.