Here’s some troubling news for my fellow World of Warcraft players. It seems
that hackers, account thieves, and other miscreants have now embraced
man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks to further their evil ways. Blizzard says it’s
not a widespread issue, and it’s rather difficult to pull off, but it’s
something y’all should be aware of.
The deal is that WoW hackers are able to infect your PC—this is a PC-only
problem, mind you, so Mac players can more or less ignore all of this—with a bit
of malware that’s then able to initiate the MITM attack. The purpose of this is
to intercept your login name, password, and authenticator number so that they
can log into your account. Once online, they can do whatever it is you’d be able
to do inside the game world: sell items, mail gold to other players, etc. They
cannot, it should be noted, delete your actual account or anything like that.
Still, it’s potentially devastating, selling all your epics for fast gold, then
turning around and selling that gold for real money to someone else.
