Battle.net Gets Hacked–Here’s What You Need to Know (And What You Need to Do)

Last August 4, Blizzard identified an attack on its servers. They're still in the process of conducting an investigation, but they've since issued a statement about the data breach. Blizzard is the developer behind World of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo III.

Before they can begin playing, gamers must create an account on Battle.net and that to log on to their games. While no financial information has been stolen, Blizzard concedes that some account details like email addresses and secret security questions and answers were stolen.

Fortunately, Battle.net users' real names, credit cards, and billing addresses weren't compromised. What was accessed instead were scrambled versions of passwords from Battle.net's North American servers, which houses information from players located in Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, North America, and Southeast Asia. This means that the passwords that were stolen weren't the actual passwords. Rather, they'd have to be deciphered individually before the user's actual password is revealed.

Nonetheless, here are four things that you can do as a precaution, if you have a Battle.net account:

• Change your password. Blizzard actually advised users to change their passwords as well. Even if the actual ones weren't stolen, there's a chance that the hackers behind the attack will sell them off or come up with a way to decipher batches of them real quick. So just to be safe, change your password.
• Change your security question and answer. Again, since this info was stolen, the wise thing to do would be to change it at once. Blizzard will be sending out notifications to all users to do this anyway.
• Update all of your accounts. If you use the same password on other accounts, like for your email or Facebook account, then change these, too. Update security questions and answers on these sites, if possible.
• Be on the lookout for phishing scams. Since email addresses were stolen, the hackers might choose to capitalize on these and sell the list off to spammers and phishers. You might see an increase in the volume of spam you get, but the emails to be wary about are the phishing emails, which will try to trick you into entering your personal information or account details.