Some potentially disturbing information has been circulating about the game World of Warcraft (WoW) this past week regarding a program Blizzard installs/run as part of the game called the “warden” which scans player’s computers looking for signatures of WoW hacks:

I watched the warden sniff down the email addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs, including those that were minimized or in the toolbar. These strings can easily contain social security numbers or credit card numbers, for example, if I have Microsoft Excel or Quickbooks open w/ my personal finances at the time.

Blizzard responds to these complaints, referring to this as “some misinformation:”

…we can’t get into what specifically it does look at, but we can say that all it tells us is whether a computer is hacking World of Warcraft. If the scan alerts us that hacking is taking place, we take action against the account, basically cutting off the access of that account to the game. Note that we have absolutely no need for any personal information from the player’s machine to take that action. That is, we can completely do our job and shut down a cheater’s account without gathering any personal data from his or her computer. Again, we have no use or desire for any personally identifying information that a player may have on his or her computer, and this particular security measure we have in place for World of Warcraft does not look at any such information on a player’s computer.

This is a thorny one. I understand Blizzard wanting to keep the game fair by locating and blocking cheaters. The game is less fun for legitimate players if cheaters are allowed to run rampant.

Then again, can’t Blizzard detect cheaters through non-intrusive, in-game means like analyzing player levelling behavior? I mean, any account with a character who levels abnormally quickly, has an inordinate amount of buffs and help could easily be flagged as a potentially suspicious account.

Bruce Schneier: “I think that a program that does all of this without the knowledge or consent of the user is a big deal. ”

It feels pretty intrusive letting WoW scan your computer that is used for other computing. In our case, we have one machine set aside for gaming, so they scan it all day long and all they will find are other games, but I can see how this would make those on a shared computer very uncomfortable.

Argh, I wish we were back discussing the much less dicey in-game WoW plague.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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