They also had a treat for those of us with Apple handheld devices: Mobile Auction House.
The beta for the mobile auction house is over. To use it now you need to pay a small monthly fee. The fee is separate and in addition to your fees for playing the game itself.
There was also a warning of bad software out there.
As many computer users know by now, Adobe web plugins have a lot of problems. Chronic problems. Adobe keeps addressing them with patches but hackers just go and find some more that they have missed.
All of their programs suffer from creeping featuritis.
Take Adobe Acrobat, for example. While the original idea of having documents look and print the same on all computers was noble and really a necessity, Adobe could not leave well enough alone.
They had to jazz it up with the ability to embed JavaScripts, do electronic forms, embed the documents in web pages, and so forth. What features to hackers find and exploit bugs in? Those very features, a lot of the time.
Which just goes to show my point: Adobe products suffer from creeping featuritis. If they had not put unnecessary features in, then they would have fewer bugs and when they find out that criminals are actively exploiting them all oer the web, they could fix them in less than a month!
Last week Adobe announced hackers were exploiting bugs in their web based/related programs: Flash, Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin and the Adobe Acrobat application. Blizzard has announced that this poses a risk to WoW game players. Adobe's mistakes could be used to steal WoW account passwords.
This is not the first time Blizzard has had to make such an announcement to its users on Adobe's behalf. In fact, I have lost count of how many times this has happened. That is why I block Flash content.
The other thing hackers are doing is luring people to counterfeit sites with a sponsored (meaning "paid for") advertisements in Google ads.
You expect to get taken to the popular Curse site for downloading free WoW addons. Of course they are free, Blizzard will not allow anybody to charge money for them.
Unfortunately, the addons on the fake Curse web site refeered to in this article contain malware added into them that will steal your wow account password.
Blizzard is frenetically touting their two phase authenticator. However, these things do not work as well as you would think. They are far from ironclad protection.
For one thing, malware these days beats those two way authenticators, which are only designed to block over the wire eavesdropping, not spyware.
For another thing, even though the password changes every minute, once the crooks receive the notice that you have logged in they communicate to your own computer system through a back door they create on it.
At this point, your system is already connected and authenticated. So as long as you are connected, they can do what they want via your own computer.
Here are some tips that will dramatically cut your changes of getting infected with malware and having your WoW account robbed.
- Never use IE, MSN chat, or Outlook for accessing the Internet or something that came from the Internet.
- If you have access to a Mac, use the Mac for WoW instead of your Windows computer.
- Use Flash and ad blockers like ClickToFlash (Safari), Ad Block Plus (Firefox), and NoScript (Firefox) addons in your web browser so that you massively cut the chances for hackers to silently get their claws into your system.
- Be skeptical. Ask yourself if you really need to have or look at something, or not. Ask how you know a site or a file is what it purports to be.
- Be meticulous. Bookmark the sites - the very pages, in fact - that you get your WoW addons from. By always getting your downloads from the same place, which you carefully verified before using it, you save yourself time and also avoid risks of being duped by blackhat SEO tricks or miscean's web search ads.
- Remember, the game has make believe enemies but these hacker guys are part of organized crime. They are your enemies both in the game and in real life. For them, crime pays and it is you who is writing the check.
Both Apple and Steve Jobs, its president, recently spoke out to warn the public of the dangers of Flash in particular and the problems in general with Adobe that put computer users at risk. At the time, some staunch supporters of Adobe products reflexively derided his comments. But the latest attacks show that he was right.
The same night, Steve Jobs made a flip comment that Google really was evil. While that seems debatable at the moment, what it does serve as a reminder is that not everything in Google searech is safe to click on.
Google does a lot to check those pages that show up in its listings but that is far from being able to catch everything. You have to be careful at your end too. Use the tips I listed above. Otherwise, you will just become criminals next victim.
This weekend, someone told me he had his WoW account broken into. No one time but three times he had it hacked. That goes to show you how active and persistent hackers are. They are pros.
And they are the ones who will put the evil in everything in computers, so they can take out of them everything that is good.
