WoW player gets hacked: claims Blizzard did it

About a month ago, Blizzard sent out an explanation that several trojans that were detected in their World of Warcraft patch updates were false positives – they were giving out a signature that looked like spyware, but weren’t actually a threat.

The false positive reports were then connected to several popular malware/virus detection applications (ex. AVG), with Blizzard subsequently contacting the app’s corresponding companies for a fix to the problem.

But then, when is a false positive truly false?

We’ll be using the case of Lonecrow as an example, who gained infamy at the WoW forums after he accused the company of hacking his character, and stealing all of his 850 gold and gear. Going into detail into this incident, Lonecrow explained that the hack occurred a day after he updated to new game patch – a patch that set off alarms on his AVG application. Lonecrow further noted that a total of three files supposedly infected with trojans were detected – these files are among those that Blizzard labelled as false positives.

And while the prospect that Blizzard as a company may have hacked Lonecrow sounds absurd, the incident does leave room for speculation. For one, why did the hack only occur after the patch download? Such a short time span between the patch update and the (possible) crime entails that the patch may have something to do with the hack.

Secondly, Lonecrow indicated that he didn’t visit any 3rd party sites, which in turn means his patch updates were directly from Blizz. As the victim himself stated, this may be the work an insider – somebody who may have a good reason to steal his loot and had access to Blizzard’s database.

Of course, this is pure speculation on our part – whether the readership decides to dismiss this as yet another tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory or a possible glimpse of a possibly bigger fish…we’ll leave for future discussions.

Via WoW Forums

About a month ago, Blizzard sent out an explanation that several trojans that were detected in their World of Warcraft patch updates were false positives – they were giving out a signature that looked like spyware, but weren’t actually a threat.

The false positive reports were then connected to several popular malware/virus detection applications (ex. AVG), with Blizzard subsequently contacting the app’s corresponding companies for a fix to the problem.

But then, when is a false positive truly false?

We’ll be using the case of Lonecrow as an example, who gained infamy at the WoW forums after he accused the company of hacking his character, and stealing all of his 850 gold and gear. Going into detail into this incident, Lonecrow explained that the hack occurred a day after he updated to new game patch – a patch that set off alarms on his AVG application. Lonecrow further noted that a total of three files supposedly infected with trojans were detected – these files are among those that Blizzard labelled as false positives.

And while the prospect that Blizzard as a company may have hacked Lonecrow sounds absurd, the incident does leave room for speculation. For one, why did the hack only occur after the patch download? Such a short time span between the patch update and the (possible) crime entails that the patch may have something to do with the hack.

Secondly, Lonecrow indicated that he didn’t visit any 3rd party sites, which in turn means his patch updates were directly from Blizz. As the victim himself stated, this may be the work an insider – somebody who may have a good reason to steal his loot and had access to Blizzard’s database.

Of course, this is pure speculation on our part – whether the readership decides to dismiss this as yet another tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory or a possible glimpse of a possibly bigger fish…we’ll leave for future discussions.

Via WoW Forums