News that Blizzard's Battle.net has been compromised will come as a shock to "Diablo 3" players and fans. Recently, Battle.net was hacked and people connected to the site faced several issues thanks to the data theft.
Taking into consideration the fact that the service stores sensitive data in plentiful, the unfortunate compromising of the site is a serious issue that needs to be addressed quickly. Blizzard, however, has been quite open about the situation and Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime released a lengthy statement on its Web site to quell angry fans.
"This week, our security team found an unauthorized and illegal access into our internal network here at Blizzard. We quickly took steps to close off this access and began working with law enforcement and security experts to investigate what happened," the company explained.
Blizzard went on to aver that no evidence suggesting that credit cards, personal details, billing addresses had been compromised was found during the investigation. "Our investigation is ongoing, but so far nothing suggests that these pieces of information have been accessed."
However, the hackers did manage to illegally acquire a list of Battle.net users' e-mail address, barring those based in China. Answers to user's personal security question and "information relating to Mobile and Dial-In Authenticators" were also compromised.
Even players' passwords (which were cryptographically scrambled) on North American servers, were stolen, but Morhaime says that these are extremely difficult to crack. He stated that Blizzard does not believe that the e-mail addresses and other information are enough to break into individual Battle.net accounts. "Based on what we currently know, this information alone is NOT enough for anyone to gain access to Battle.net accounts," Morhaime averred.
Blizzard's attempt to placate and reassure users not withstanding, the company recommends that as a precautionary measure players on North American servers change their passwords. Additionally, Blizzard intends on automatically prompting players on the North American server to change their password and security question. To access change the password one can visit this link.
"We take the security of your personal information very seriously, and we are truly sorry that this has happened," added an apologetic Blizzard.
