WoW Players... Your game is spyware.

Post by **Pext** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 2:33 pm

http://www.rootkit.com/blog.php?newsid=358

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.

Post by **SOAPboy** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 2:44 pm

Old
And it dont matter.. its only scanning title bar information, nothing else..

Its looking for KNOWN bots, nothing more nothing less..

Hell its less invasive than punkbuster

BTW, way to be late.. its been in WoW since like 1.7 or 1.6

Post by **Foo** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 2:50 pm

The program works by taking all of the things it's scanning and hashing them. That's a one-way process. The hashes are compared to known hashes.

So from what's said in that article we gather:
1. The known hashes are sent to the users PC, and compared on the users PC. The various pieces of information being collected are not transmitted to blizzard. All that is transmitted is a confirmation if one of the items matches a hash value
2. Like i said hashes are 1-way. You can't find out the original string from it's hash unless you know it already. So even if these hashes were being transmitted, it's not a privacy concern.

In short, I think the ones being suckered here aren't WoW players, but those who buy into that rubbish article.

Post by **SOAPboy** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 2:59 pm

Foo wrote:The program works by taking all of the things it's scanning and hashing them. That's a one-way process. The hashes are compared to known hashes.

So from what's said in that article we gather:
1. The known hashes are sent to the users PC, and compared on the users PC. The various pieces of information being collected are not transmitted to blizzard. All that is transmitted is a confirmation if one of the items matches a hash value
2. Like i said hashes are 1-way. You can't find out the original string from it's hash unless you know it already. So even if these hashes were being transmitted, it's not a privacy concern.

In short, I think the ones being suckered here aren't WoW players, but those who buy into that rubbish article.

Yeah and its not like Bliz is going to steal my CC info.. they kinda already have it..

Post by **Foo** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 3:02 pm

SOAPboy wrote:Yeah and its not like Bliz is going to steal my CC info.. they kinda already have it..

That's not really the issue. Your personal information should be kept secure regardless of who you trust or don't. Though you yourself might implicitly trust blizzard with your information (and there's a lot more to personal information that just a credit card number) that obviously doesn't hold for all Blizzard customers.

If Blizzard's software was actively enabling personal information to be transmitted out of your PC without your implicit knowledge, that would definitely be an issue, contrary to what you're saying.