World of Warcraft spykit gets encrypted - ElReg

[Poag]

Tuesday's patch to World of Warcraft introduced new content and tweaks to the land of Azeroth, but with it came an important change to The Warden, Blizzard's ill-famed tool against cheaters.

According to Warden-watching modders, the latest version is now encrypted, adding a major barrier for tinfoil hats who track what information the application sends home to Blizzard.

The Warden's function as an anti-hacking sentry was already cause for concern for some privacy advocates. From the moment players log into the game, The Warden checks open window names, process names, memory modifications, DDL names and other pieces of data in the background. The goal is to determine if the user has a specific hack or program loaded and sends back a "yes" or "no" answer to Blizzard.

At any given time, there is one version of The Warden active in a set of WoW servers. But Blizzard fights would-be countermeasures against The Warden by switching between hundreds of different copies of The Warden with the same functionality, but containing slight modifications in the code.

This technique of polymorphic code is more commonly applied in computer viruses and worms as a way to avoid detection from anti-virus and intrusion detection software. According to The WardenNet, a website dedicated to tracking the iterations of the application, there are about 320 copies of The Warden in circulation.

World of Warcraft tinfoil hat

There are some legitimate arguments for the intrusion of privacy. Massive Multiplayer economies such as WoW can be ravaged by gold-farming bots or hacks. It's Blizzard's responsibility to not only protect the game experience, but their intellectual property and marketability of the game. And nothing, after all, is forcing anyone to play if they disagree with the policy.

Blizzard maintains that The Warden does not gather any personally identifiable information about the player. They claim only information about the account is sent back. Third-party applications such as The Governor and ISXWarden could previously monitor The Warden and curtail activities the authors deem invasive.

But with Blizzard now utilizing a different random cryptographic hash function in every copy of The Warden, customers lose that potential safeguard. On one hand, most customers have already put a large amount of trust in the company by giving Blizzard their credit card to pay the monthly fee. On the other, this could theoretically give Blizzard access to other pieces of private information without customer knowledge.

Such a scenario may be a stretch, but the change is indicative of the leaps of faith some companies are asking (and too often not asking) their customers to make in order to protect their software.

As of this publication, Blizzard has not returned requests for comment. ®
By Austin Modine

http://regmedia.co.uk/2007/11/15/wowtinfoilhat.jpg

[Poag]

My take on the above.


Media drama bomb. Its really not an issue, Warden only reads what is memory resident. On my gaming PC the only thigns I have running are Steam, EvEmon, WoW [if playing] and Curse updater.

As long as people followa simple set of rules of closing down apps before starting wow then blizzard wont get anything incriminating from the "Headers" of each program.


There was an article in the US about a guy who complained that he was getting his account numbers read by blizz. Becuase he headed his excel files as "Account <account number> SS <social Security number>" whichis so stupid its unreal :)

[Tampler]

My take on the above.


Media drama bomb. Its really not an issue, Warden only reads what is memory resident. On my gaming PC the only thigns I have running are Steam, EvEmon, WoW [if playing] and Curse updater.

As long as people followa simple set of rules of closing down apps before starting wow then blizzard wont get anything incriminating from the "Headers" of each program.





Well said.

[Azog]

What means could blizz even have to store and read millions and millions of entries of data even if they wanted it? Does someone think if blizz happens to store some of your personal information there's a gm reading juuust your data from the millions of entries there would be? What kind of interest would blizz have to gather some certain type of data if it wasn't anti-hack related?

At the same time people want games to be anti-exploitable-hackable-cheatable and whatnot they demand to see everything that's going on, making the information available for the people doing the hacking and whatnot...Some people should make up their mind and learn you can't have everything.

[Violentblue]

The only reason i could think of for them wanting to collect additional information on the user, would basically be market research, if they can find out what you have installed, and what you use most frequently, they would be able to use the blizzard launcher to contain adverts specifically catered to you, i doubt this is the case though, and i certainly doubt that there could/would be any other motive if it infact were.

[Poag]

Blizzard maintains that The Warden does not gather any personally identifiable information about the player. They claim only information about the account is sent back. Third-party applications such as The Governor and ISXWarden could previously monitor The Warden and curtail activities the authors deem invasive.


ok when i posted it i did't mean for the discussion to go along the lines of "OMG they are spiessss" etc...ok well i did a little for drama value ;) but not the entire reason.

Theres a certain line that interested me, i have highlighted it above.


Ok so there are the privacy nuts out there, who dont want people knowing they are running "Buttplug32.exe" in the background....but if there are people doing it for one reason, i'll bet alot more are doing it to get around warden, and cheat/hack at the game.

Two sides to the story, not only are the privacy nuts protecting themselves...they are also protecting cheats...with some modifications which I doubt noone has done yet.

[Splinter]

Sorry, I don't have anything to add to this conversation on an intellectual level, I merely don't care, but; this just makes it all the more funny when my blizzard downloader seems to be confused about why I have a firewall. Go Blizzard go!

p.s. Bots cause inflation which is good for players as it reduces relative price of repair bills.

[Azog]

ok when i posted it i did't mean for the discussion to go along the lines of "OMG they are spiessss" etc...ok well i did a little for drama value ;) but not the entire reason.


Hmm nobody said they are spies? :P I merely pointed out how hard it would even be to be one when there's millions of subscribers involved.



Ok so there are the privacy nuts out there, who dont want people knowing they are running "Buttplug32.exe" in the background....but if there are people doing it for one reason, i'll bet alot more are doing it to get around warden, and cheat/hack at the game.

Two sides to the story, not only are the privacy nuts protecting themselves...they are also protecting cheats...with some modifications which I doubt noone has done yet.

And that's exactly the point I said with different terms. The privacy nuts want too much so they whine, which is so heart breaking on personal level for me. I wouldn't care rats ass if someone at blizz would find out I have manlove.exe (hypotetical situation ofcourse!) running in the background if it keeps the hackers from ruining my game.

[Desaan]

There you go Azog!

http://www.pimall.com/nais/images/toymicrospykit.jpg

Happy spying!

[Banzia]

I have no problem sharing my porn collection with blizzard

[Poag]

Hmm nobody said they are spies? :P I merely pointed out how hard it would even be to be one when there's millions of subscribers involved.



And that's exactly the point I said with different terms. The privacy nuts want too much so they whine, which is so heart breaking on personal level for me. I wouldn't care rats ass if someone at blizz would find out I have manlove.exe (hypotetical situation ofcourse!) running in the background if it keeps the hackers from ruining my game.

Hey Azog i wasn't directing it you, and thats exactly my point. The privacy nuts are bypassing the protection blizzard has put in place, and thus opening the way for cheats to abuse the system, it defeats the objective of warden, and brings an element of "maybe" into the whole cheater thing.

[Azog]

Hey Azog i wasn't directing it you, and thats exactly my point. The privacy nuts are bypassing the protection blizzard has put in place, and thus opening the way for cheats to abuse the system, it defeats the objective of warden, and brings an element of "maybe" into the whole cheater thing.

They're hacking the protection to see what's there? O_o Surefire way of getting banned and maybe other consequences if they get caught :P

[Jeddak]

Hmm I like an intresting debate. I guess like Poag says there are two sides to every story.

For myself I see pros and cons to this.

Pros,

Makes anyone cheating or thinking about it, consider very carefully if its really worth it. This makes it more likely that the game is played as intended and cuts down on market abuse in game

Cons,

No one can say for certain what Blizzard are collecting, why should they have the right to take what they like from your PC just cause you play their game. Would you allow Microsoft or your bank the same access? After all Sony and Microsoft have both been in court over similar programmes in the past.

Makes no odds to me, I just like to try to see both sides.

[peanutbutter]

I have no problem sharing my porn collection with blizzard

i heard Blizzard also has a upload tool installed on your pc Banz, must be true then