This was going to happen eventually. Especially with the real money auction house: the desire to commit fraud is just too great in some people. But Battle.Net has been breached, and if you’ve got a World of Warcraft account or play Diablo III, time to change your passwords.
The good news is that the digital thieves didn’t get at credit card information, real names, or anything that could be used to impersonate you outside of Battle.Net.
The bad news is that the thieves made off with a whole bunch of hashed passwords. Also, mobile Authenticators may be “compromised.”
It’s unlikely anybody will be severely affected by this: Hashed passwords have to be decoded one by one, after all. But at the same time, this is likely only going to intensify the discontent many fans have with Battle.net and Blizzard’s demand that every game they sell you be connected to the Internet all of the time. Diablo III‘s infamous Error 37, StarCraft II‘s even more infamous “We Want LAN” debacle… eventually they’re going to have to explain to their users why these problems are worth it to the customer and not just to Blizzard.
And they’re running out of time to come up with something good.
image courtesy Blizzard