Rookit.com alleges that Blizzard, RTS/RPG producing extraordinaire, is guilty of snooping through the PCs of World of Warcraft owners. This breach of privacy is possible because of a spyware program called “Warden Client” that installs with WoW. Kotaku reports that this program runs every 15 seconds that you’re playing WoW and can “read the window text in the title bar of every window. However, these ain’t windows related to WoW, but any ol’ program running on your computer. ” While the warden client is supposed to track down “cheat-ware”, it clearly goes above and far beyond its call-of-duty.

Update: Apparently the Warden utilizes a form of secure hash-coding to prevent Blizzard from getting any of your personal info from these frequent reports. Blizzard is notified if, and only if, Warden discovers an application on its banned list. So although Blizzard employs a form of intrusive spyware, it does not use it to profit, but rather to maintain a hack-free WoW environment.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2005 at 7:50 pm and is tagged with secure hash, ol program, frequent reports, blizzard, rts, call of duty, world of warcraft, personal info, breach, hack. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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