Blizzard’s Battle.Net Hacked – Video Games Update
The CEO of Blizzard has confirmed that there was a security breach in Battle.Net and some unauthorised user might have acquired sensitive user account data.
Mike Morhaime, the head of Blizzard, revealed on the official website that Blizzard’s security team has discovered that there was a breach in their system and hackers have managed to obtain the email addresses of all the users outside China.
Mike believes that as of right now, Blizzard doesn’t believe that the Hackers can gain access to users’ Battle.Net accounts just with the stolen email addresses but he encouraged gamers to refresh their passwords and other security details just in case.
"At this time, we've found no evidence that financial information such as credit cards, billing addresses, or real names were compromised," stated Mike in the statement on the official Blizzard website and went on to say that Blizzard is continuing the investigation
regarding the security breach but so far no evidence has emerged which would suggest that sensitive information was compromised.
“We also know that cryptographically scrambled versions of Battle.net passwords (not actual passwords) for players on North American servers were taken. We use Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP) to protect these passwords, which is designed to make it
extremely difficult to extract the actual password, and also means that each password would have to be deciphered individually,” stated Mike who believes that user passwords are still safe as they were stored with a heavy encryption which will require a lot
of time to be cracked.
Blizzard is one of the most successful developers in the world and this news has many gamers troubled and scrambling over to Battle.Net to check if their account is still safe. A lot of gamers are also sceptical about Blizzard’s press release and believe
that they are not getting the complete story as Blizzard is trying it’s best to play down the incident.
Blizzard is the third Video game company to be hit by hackers, the first one being Sony with the PlayStation Network leak, followed by Codemasters and finally Valve who also reported that only the email addresses of users were stolen.
Blizzard has apologised to all its users and is encouraging them to change their passwords and security details just to be on the safe side.
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