Blizzard's Korean office raided over Diablo 3 complaints
Despite a rocky Diablo III launch, Blizzard has been gradually making the game experience more enjoyable for its players. But it appears some players in South Korea are not so easily appeased.
The Diablo III experience has gradually gotten better after a rocky launch, with Blizzard working diligently to fix in-game issues, stabilize servers and improve the experience. But the company is in hot water in South Korea over those same issues because of its refund policy.
Blizzard's Seoul offices were raided by Korean authorities this week because of complaints to the country's Fair Trade Commission that the company would not issue refunds to players unhappy with the game, according to The Korea Times. The FTC said it is investigating whether Blizzard was "ill-prepared" for the crush of players, and looking into whether the company's no-return policy violates Korean law on electronic commerce and commercial contracts.
A spokesman for the FTC told The Times that it had received enough complaints from Diablo III players to launch an investigation. Blizzard Korea has doubled its servers and has promised to improve its service to avoid further problems, but it hasn't been enough to staunch the complaints and assuage disgruntled players.
If the FTC finds that Blizzard violated the law, it could force the company to issue refunds to those requesting them. All of Blizzard's franchises--World of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo--have a huge fan base in Korea, perhaps prompting the added government scrutiny.
The highly anticipated sequel has sold incredibly well, and has been a rather engrossing experience for me.
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Shacknews
replyJohn Keefer posted a new article, Blizzard's Korean office raided over Diablo 3 complaints.
Despite a rocky Diablo III launch, Blizzard has been gradually making the game experience more enjoyable for its players. But it appears some players in South Korea are not so easily appeased.-
Error 37: Lord of Disconnect
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Because it's a goddamn video game. Get over it. Go do something else for an hour while they work on shit.
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That's utterly ridiculous.
It's a product that people purchased. Blizzard should absolutely be responsible to the customer. That's why there are consumer protection laws and all that.-
Yes, I understand that. I don't think Diablo III has been the consumer Holocaust that the internet paints it as, however.
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Ugh, I hope not. There is no way that a government investigation of a video game company leads to anything positive for the industry in the long term.
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I think there are much more worrisome problems in the gaming industry, with companies doing far worse shit that should be investigated, than this.
Blizzard is doing the best they can (if it's not enough, it's another topic) to address the problems and people have the right to be pissed, but a government investigation? C'mon.-
Accusations of covering up a significant cyber security breach when personal & financial information is involved is a pretty big deal.
There's a reason companies will play it safe with this stuff, and let everyone know when there's the slightest indication that their servers have been breached. You don't fuck around with this stuff.
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Do you live in Korea? If not it might be difficult to know the state of playing the game there.
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I'm not 'white knighting' anything. I've been affected by the server issues a few times during my 30+ hours of gameplay, but I'm not about to heel my shit down the drain and call the BBB about it.
It's not like the online-only component of the game was a diabolical secret kept from consumers. And since you knew that there was an online component for the game, any reasonable person should expect there to be issues. Are people losing their shit and calling the BBB when WoW goes down for emergency maintenance?
If you're not on board for the kind of issues that come with an online-only product, don't buy that product.-
but you are. either that or you aren't but you sure as hell sound like it.
telling people with legitimate bones to pick "it's a goddamned videogame. get over it" and then telling them to go do something else instead of use the product they paid for does not in any way whatsoever make you look like you're doing anything other than saying leave blizzard allllllllllllllone!!!-
"either that or you aren't"
This is excellent analysis.
I'm not telling people to not be pissed - I was pissed as hell when I couldn't log in on Tuesday.
However, any notion of legal ramifications, or a 'refund' in this case I think are pretty ridiculous.-
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This entire thread is about legal ramifications/refunds. Did you read the actual article?
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my original reply, which spun off this entire cute little back and forth we're having did not originate with the legal aspect of the discussion. it was purely in response to your wise "it's a videogame stop complaining" remark.
if you would like to spin it into something it's not, i suppose you can try to save it that way.
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You say you aren't "white knighting", but you are always in these threads making excuses. Some people have been affected more, some less. Your reasoning doesn't wash for a commercial product where design decisions were made to require the game to be online. People complained about Live being down and PSN and were compensated. Why should this be any different?
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Because, as walker points out somewhere in this thread, the two situations are completely different and not exactly comparable.
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In this case you may be correct, but given the context of your previous posts it's not a leap to think you were getting out your armor and horse.
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Man, I don't know what you're talking about. All I've been saying since D3 launched is that this whole situation isn't quite as bad as everyone (the Internet) is making it out to be - that if you didn't expect these kinds of issues with D3 you really didn't know as much about the game as you should have before buying it.
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You keep saying these things as if they are fact, but they are not.
You claim that the situation isn't as bad as everyone claims it is, yet the launch difficulties and frustrations have been painfully apparent and documented.
You also claim that people should have expected "these kinds of issues". Well, I think it's perfectly reasonable for a consumer to not have to expect 30+ hours of chaos after they have purchased a product. I don't think that is a reasonable expectation an average consumer should have.
So your entire argument boils down to "it wasn't as bad as people make it out", which you do absolutely nothing to prove, and that average consumer expectations for the product they paid for should have been way, way lower. That doesn't really sound reasonable. Imagine if someone at Blizzard said "Yeah guys, don't worry if we have a bad launch, I'm sure the customers low expectations will mitigate that". Do you see how unrealistic that sounds?
Knowing "much about the game" should not be a pre-requisite for buying a game.
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If you're the kind of person whose life commitments only allow you to play for a couple of hours at a time here and there and you can't because Blizzard decided to turn this into a single player MMO then I can see being pissed.
I mean right now I could go to Fry's, pay $60 for this game, then have no idea if it will work once I get home. Which means I'm not going to buy it. -
What if it wasn't a video game, but say...a car tied to DRM? You have to register your car with the manufacturer to prove you didn't steal it. The engine won't start if the car companies servers go down...would that be okay?
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What if you needed to connect to the internet to breathe oxygen! OMG call the BBB.
It's a good thing we're just talking about playing a video game here.-
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So? Both are products that you've purchased to be able to use when you need to. Would you be okay with it if I used movies for my comparison instead? Both are visual media you use for entertainment. Imagine if you bought a DVD that you couldn't watch because you needed to authenticate with the MPAA servers and if the servers were down, you couldn't.
These days, products and services are being artificially restricted for no practical reason whatsoever. The fact that many people seem to be okay with that is really strange to me.
There is no reason you shouldn't be able to play this game completely offline with separate characters.-
I would argue that there's no point at which you need to play a video game but there's plenty of times when one would reasonably need to be able to use a car.
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There are plenty of other methods of getting around if you absolutely need to...walk, bicycle, public transit, taxi/cab. Lots of people around the world get by without a car. Owning a vehicle is a luxury, IMO.
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Way to miss the point.
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Way to miss the point.
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Jesus H Fucking Christ on a popsicle stick this is a terrible analogy.
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How is it not working as intended? It's been clearly advertised as an ONLINE ONLY product - when in the history of ONLINE ONLY products have there not been a few hiccups?
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we could argue "clearly advertised" till we're blue in the face. i would argue they intentionally don't make it super clear the level of persistent connection SP gameplay will require, nor the potentials of service interruptions for whatever reason. "internet connection required" is on the requirements though, for sure, but that could mean a lot of different things.
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Bullshit. They've gone over and over and over the online requirement and their reasoning for it. You'd have to purposely ignore the entire issue to avoid finding out about it.
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I'm saying it would be incredibly hard to claim they weren't forthcoming about the online-only nature. It's listed right on the box and if you're unsure of what that means, the slightest amount of search would make it completely clear.
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gokart is arguing that Blizzard has intentionally hidden the online-only nature of the game. That's simply a retarded opinion to hold.
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The only thing that's truly retarded is your lack of reading comprehension. He didn't say Blizzard was intentionally hiding anything. What he did say is that they aren't making it clear enough concerning the constant internet connection mandate. And by that I'm pretty sure he's referring to the boxed product on shelves. Anyone who's followed online news of D3 within the past few months would obviously already know about their online only plans. The average consumer who picks up the game off a shelf would not. Simply stating on the box that an internet connection is required isn't enough. Most every PC game released in the last few years has had this requirement.
When Ubisoft pulled this shit on people, at least they were forthright enough to plainly state on the front cover "a permanent internet connection is required to play the game", which still isn't factually true. People would still be unable to play the game if the company's servers went down, regardless of whether a person has a "permanent" connection or not.-
He said they intentionally weren't making it clear enough. How is that not hiding something?
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If they were trying to "hide" the fact it was online only, they wouldn't have said anything at all about needing an internet connection. The problem is they didn't explain exactly why an internet connection was needed. Like the fact that it's necessary to have an uninterrupted connection 24/7 in order to play single-player. Which is something that should have absolutely been stated on the front of the box in large print. Not to mention the fact that you would be unable to play while their servers were down for any reason.
There can only be one of 2 reasons why they weren't specific about the net requirement on the box. They're either a mega-corporation that's extremely incompetent, or, more likely, they were hoping that individuals who bought it would discover the full details only after they had brought it home, opened it up, started installing it, and just clicked through every EULA so they could finally begin playing what they paid 60 or more dollars for. I'd say the likelihood of someone just accepting it after all that is much higher than if they'd known the details beforehand. If this was the intended outcome Blizzard was hoping for, that would be labeled as "Deceptive" or "Misleading", because anyone could simply mistake "internet connection required" as a reference to the multiplayer and/or activating the game.
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So people should just bend over when corporations try to fuck them?
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Because for some reason people feel game companies should not be held to the same standards as companies like Apple and Sony...
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People upset at their iPads literally killed Steve Jobs.
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it's a symptom of fan anger
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you have a stake in defending blizzard with diane working there so do you think you can be objective about the situation?
sony fucked up and took their PR licks just like blizzard. i actually got a years free identity fraud monitoring. i don't see what sony has to do with blizzards situation.
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Sony took PSN down following a massive compromise. They took their PR licks because of that compromise. The comparison doesn't hold.
Also, D3's network up time in the US & EU is something like 80 or 90%.
I think part of the problem is their error messages don't provide sufficient information as to what's going on. If their server page claims everything is up, then Error 37 means try again. It doesn't mean stuff is down. You may have to try half a dozen or more times to get in, but you'll get in because it's up.
Instead I think people are getting Error 37 once or twice, assuming it's down, and bitching.
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i'm not comparing blizzard and sony. i didn't bring that up, i just commented on it. i even said i don't see what sony has to do with blizzards situation.
an up time of 80% is nothing to brag about dude.
i agree about proper communication. it's a running joke that on patch day when it inevitably goes south and into extended maintenance (shocking) they just put out the "we'll let you know".-
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just to note i don't have any issue really with the down time. when it's down, i assume it's to work on the infrastructure to provide us with a better experience going forward. "oh well, i'll watch nfl network" or whatever is my response.
i can understand why people are annoyed though, and that's where my pov for my comments is coming from pretty much.
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i don't really think you are objective, but i don't want to personally upset you.
i want them to allocate enough resources, whatever they may be, to keep their network up at a reasonable latency.
i know that's a lot to ask of a company with their experience in online multi million client connection gaming and financial standing.
blizzard has taken their PR licks because they deserve the punches. the game itself is extraordinarily fun, love it. it doesn't excuse all the issues they currently have.
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yep i agree. day by day i'm sure it's smoothing out and will soon be a non issue.
do you not think that with all the time blizz had for preparation and analytic study with products they already run that they couldn't have had a better handle on expected slams on bnet? on any facet of the release there shouldn't have been any shocks with the unmatched experience/resources they have.
is it truly a situation that nobody could have prepared for?
i think the lag thing is from the HC people and inferno levels where lag comes into play pretty heavily.-
The problem is one pretty much everyone online game/service faces. The situation is often quite predictable. They know they won't have capacity for launch date. The only way they possibly could is to spend significant money on new hardware that will then be idle forever after the first day/week or whatever. That doesn't make for good business and they have shareholders to appease, so you take a hit with customers to help your long term profits. It was such a common problem that a number of huge companies have cloud programming platforms (Amazon Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine, etc) specifically aimed at solving this kind of issue for web services.
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You are, purposely I suspect, omitting the fact it was also heavily pre ordered; it was the most preordered game of all time on amazon, if I remember correctly. Add that to the annual pass holders. Are you suggesting that blizz had no access to these numbers Or somehow had their head in the sand? I find either situation ridiculously unlikely and suspect they had full knowledge of the coming surge.
Also, the downloads went live on launch day several hours before it went live. Blizzard knew EXACTLY how many players were poised to play at midnight. Now, wether or not that was enough time to react, I can't really guess.
But don't use "fastest selling game of all time" to suggest blizz had no forecasting of what would occur. They likely knew full well thier servers we're going to get shit on and chose to ride it out; though, additional sales during the week certainly compounded the situation.
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The bad PR is deserved. However you spin it, they launched a product that has performed poorly on a consisten basis since release. What is wanted of blizzard is a stable product and, in this case, the provision of refunds to customers displeased by the inadequacy of the product.
I personally am hanging in there. I know the consistent 300+ ping will resolve when the player base levels out. But I completely understand that with this large of a player population that some will be unhappy, and that they have a right to be.-
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You are right, we shouldn't have to wait. But I know that's just how these things work, as I am sure blizz does. But let's at least call it what it is: a poor job by blizz that's led to an even poorer experience. It should be fixed =\
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You are being narrow-minded. I am speaking towards industry standards as a whole, not just one incident. Obviously you will find more clear cut comparisons such as the one mentioned. Companies are responsible for their products, wether it be a Walkman (awwww yeah), online service or video game. The later doesn't get a pass just because you feel it is not serious enough to merit attention.
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a) Because these people want to play the game and if they did get a refund for something they know they want to play then they will probably just buy it again later anyway.
b) Blizzard probably SHOULD readily hand out refunds due to A.
c) Complaining to the government to get them involved hurts everyone and just slows down the process. That's just using tax money to deal with video games. Then Blizzard has to spend the money to deal with the government's involvement.
I don't really see much in the way of winning going on for anyone. -
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Damn I was hoping to make a raiding joke first :p
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sperg rush morelike
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It's been my information that South Korea's internet access is phenomenal - speeds that would make you cry at very cheap prices.
So the issue is probably Blizzard's end. I get that it's difficult or impossible, at this point, to accurately scale out for demand on a game like this at launch but the people buying the game don't care.
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At least my sound card works perfectly.
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I don't know what that means but I guess you don't get there until you've done a lot of stuff in game?
If that's the case, then sure, maybe they don't deserve a refund. But where do you draw that line? How much playing is too much? 1 hour? 5 hours spread across weeks and you have only been able to access it for 10 minutes at a time?-
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yea, i think it is very difficult to draw a line under ALL games, i mean, so games like MMO's will have 1000 hours of game play so i say a refund after 10-20 hours is normal, but some games have 4 hour single player campaign and if someone played the entire game and didn't like it, i think they should not get a refund, it is like with a movie, like it or not, you paid $12 for your movie...
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Probably the same people that wanted a ME3 refund after reaching the ending. Video gamers are just shitty consumers sometimes.
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Different standards; US customers would be told "Tough; no refunds; go away, stupid entitled gamer." That's because the US market is purely "caveat emptor", since the federal and state legal systems haven't caught up with technology, or a $60-per-unit entertainment medium becoming a $60-plus-per-unit quasi-service offering. The best you can do in the US is file a complaint to the BBB, who will then follow up with the company for a comment, and threaten to downgrade their BBB rating if there's no satisfactory resolution or explanation.
In Korea, it's not an accepted norm; their FTC takes consumer complaints seriously, and files criminal offenses for violations.
My position is that there are bad games, and there are half-broken games-as-a-service offerings, but the consumer should still be able to get a relatively good opportunity to play the game. For numerous customers, Diablo 3 hasn't stood up to that test. Is it unfair to Blizzard? Some may think so, but Blizzard painted themselves into that corner by enforcing always-connected, but not having the infrastructure or software tuning to be able to withstand interruptions or oversubscription. It's up to them to fix that, and/or compensate those unsatisfied who meet the legal requirements for compensation.-
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If it's through a credit card, and is an egregiously bad move by the merchant or service provider, you can charge back, but I don't feel confident that US credit card companies would let a cardholder file a dispute for an online-only video game that failed to provide good service. Maybe someone in the US who bought Diablo 3 on their card and was barely able to play it could try this if they're within the 60-day period.
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Good, if the product isn't playable and they wont return the money, it's fraud. Why do so many people have a problem with this? The product doesn't work as advertised.
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agree with you but, i am sure that if you read fine print it will say something like "server can be down for certain reasons for up to X number of hours a day" and buy buying this game and creating an account with battle.net you agree to those terms.... they can be assholes, i agree, but you signed up for it, can't complain now... i don't think it says anywhere that the game is up 24x7!
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and the law states that the game HAS to be online 14/7?
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an eula is basically a company trying to cover its ass in as much legalese as humanly possible. just because they say something like "our product might explode and destroy the sun" doesnt mean they cant be held accountable for destroying the sun. just because they claim we might have problems doesnt mean they automatically get a free pass if the customer demands a refund. different countries treat such things differently, obviously south korea is taking exception to this.
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i would think that before they can put the product on the market with their eula, it has to go through gov. approval, so the government will say - yes you can blow up the sun or not... but i just hope so... don't think this is actually the case
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lol my bad.. meant to say 24... but in blizz hours it is = 14/7 :)
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I like how you're the arbitrator deciding the parameters for someone else's happiness and satisfaction. It's cute! I'd like to follow you around and tell you how you should be happy about all the things in your life that you're not happy about based on my own arbitrary conditions and decisions.
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error 37. AH offline a LOT. commodities suspended. granted, I've put in lots of D3 time. but blizzard will be judged by UPTIME. they knew there would be a fuckload of people. they were negligent in reviewing their own data to be prepared for 100% uptime.
that korean post says they are adding all sorts of back end stuff as fast as possible. WELL SHITFUCK, who was holding that shit back at launch????
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Fraud. This word does not mean what you think it means.
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You're right, it would mean intent and that's clearly not here. Ok, so lets choose another word or phrase. Defective product?
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I think this is silly but I have a hard time feeling sorry for Blizzard, for reasons in yesterdays Escapist vid.
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they should a put an authenticator on the door they would have had to known the code to get in!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Diablo 3 is alright, but all of the technical issues have left a bitter taste in my mouth. Honestly, D3 is the first game I've played where "always-online DRM" has been a problem for me. Then there is also the fact that some people with authenticators claim that they've been hacked, which makes me nervous to join any sort of "Open" game. Everytime I sit down to play it, even in "singleplayer" games, I lag like a mofo (200-300+ ping). The constant server/AH downtime is also pretty shitty. I've also got a bad feeling that hacking incidents will skyrocket once the RMAH is in place....
D3 is a pretty fun game when everything is working out OK, but I can honestly say I'll probably be dropping the game entirely once Torchlight 2 gets released.
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as far as I know, the RMAH has been delayed indefinitely.
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well foo is the best admin ever, he knows what's up.
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true!
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Why does everyone keep saying "no one with an authenticator has been hacked". Yet the blue post says it start up. "Very few with authenticators have been hacked. I personally viewed the MSINFO on these systems and they had tons of malware".
RMAH requires an authenticator or you cant even use it. So if hacking picks up because of it then wtf? Make up your god damn minds.-
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Uh no. I saw the post and posted about it here not 2 hours after he posted it.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5149542352#6
I checked again though and he posted clarifying that he was talking about WoW and not D3.-
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This thread was deleted from the official forums (not before hitting 20 pages):
The hacking that is going on (stripping characters of gold/items but leaving them undeleted and with the same password) is due to an exploit that allows the hackers to simply bypass the login authentication for accounts entirely. It does not bypass the separate authenticator dongle check
The hacking is not caused by keyloggers, trojans, phishing, or any other form of "user error" that could be avoided on the player's part. The exploit is due to a weakness with how the servers communicate, and all the hackers need to know to log into your account is your account name (battle.tag, email address, etc,).
Using the mobile authenticator or dongle will protect your account for now, but given how the exploit operates it is plausible that they too could be bypassed (more doubtful, however).
If you cannot set up an authenticator or want to protect your assets until you can, the best thing you can do is be aware of how the hackers operate. They are using a simple autoit script to sell your characters items from your worn gear and stash, then transfer all your IGG. You can work around this by looking at how the bots currently work.
Put all your gear that you want to save in the second tab of your stash, and fill the first tab with junk gear. Anything you have equipped will be stolen, and they can log onto your account while you are still on it, kicking you offline. So keep in mind that worn items are a liability- keep anything particularly valuable hidden in the 2nd page of your stash. Your gold cannot be protected, as it is shared across characters. The bot currently only attacks the first (or possibly highest level) character on each account, ignoring the rest, as only 1 character is needed to swipe all your gold.
Since all the hackers need to clear out your account is your battle.tag, the best defense is to not have that visible anywhere. As long as you remain entirely anonymous, they cannot hit you. However, anything as simple as joining a public game (particularly in inferno), or being on a friend's friends list, or talking in chat, or posting on these very forums, can all expose your account.
If you have already been hacked, the best you can do is apply for a service ticket to have your account roll-backed. You will likely lose progress and possibly even more than what the hackers took, since save points that you will be rollbacked to can be up to a week old, likely a day or two.
The hacks are not caused by keyloggers, phishing or malware. They are not avoidable, and there is nothing you can do to stop yourself from being targeted, only to protect yourself with an authenticator to stop them from getting on your account.
A Blizzard PR stated that their "servers have not been compromised". This is true only in the least sense- the servers have indeed not been compromised and your personal data has not been leaked, they have not stolen passwords or credit card numbers. They have simply bypassed the 'secure' servers entirely thus your password is irrelevant.-
Also, as far as I know no one has posted a demonstration of this hacking, and this sort of sounds "conspiracy theory" ish. However, I will say if it's this easy to get shared passwords from forums and stuff, people would likely be losing a lot of money from a variety of websites they use (credit cards, banks, paypal, etc...).
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This sounds just like what happened to my friend. He called and got his account rolled back. Dude where were you when I was getting piled on the other day for mentioning this sort of thing may be going on >:(
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Please don't believe that spew. Please oh please be rational and don't believe things just because some guy on the internet said it. =[ =[
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It could very well have been that his account got hacked a while back too. With WoW or something.
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If this were legit, then more people would be able to demonstrate it than just hackers trying to steal your shit. Athene wouldn't have had to put his password on his stream for his shit to get stolen. Every single person streaming on twitch.tv would have had their shit stolen.
This is someone throwing words around a session id and sprinkling in other people's accounts so people believe his claim. -
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Less unsubstantiated claims more facts plzkthx.
I swear to God people on the internet will believe anything these days.-
This wouldn't be the first instance of a complete bypass of an authentication routine. Remember all of those Windows security updates with "unauthenticated remote attacker" in the description?
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it's ok, the new phoenix firewall will be online soon
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The account of the exploit is internally inconsistent.
The exploit bypasses the authentication process entirely, meaning you don't need the login or password -- a battletag is (apparently) sufficient. Yet this doesn't work if you have an authenticator attached. But the authenticator is only used in the authentication process that this attack is bypassing.
How does the authenticator protect against this? You expect me to believe Blizzard Devs implemented two forms of IPC in Diablo 3 -- one special one for people with an authenticator, and one for those without?
Like I said, sounds like the dude's taking the available information & conjecture to create a plausible sounding explanation. Throw in some basic but special info (automation scripts are well known by any software dev who actually tests their shit), and a lot of people will buy into it even if it's complete garbage.
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<facepalm>
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they've seen botnets of 300-400K machines. never underestimate peoples abilities to fuck up their computers or continue using them while they're fucked up.
i would expect the penetration rate to be considerably higher if there were a way to hijack accounts as easily as that thread claimed.-
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Serious question:
Has any virus or malware detection company ever reported a known piece of malware which SPECIFICALLY targets Blizzard products?
I think your average keylog software is looking for bank information and passwords to important shit, not Blizzard usernames and passwords.-
Here's a direct quote from Blizzard.
"What is the concrete cause of the hackings? I can’t believe that there are so much cases, i highly doubt most of those can be attributed to the victim’s downloading apps and stuff.
Well, the cause is people desiring a shortcut in their games by buying gold. If you mean the technical cause, as I mentioned previously the gold selling companies use a vast array of methods. A good friend of mine is a long time network admin (and a very good one at that), who had decided to not use an authenticator because he’d never had any security issues with his computer over the years. Well, an Adobe Flash vulnerability popped up a couple years ago, and he procrastinated applying the update by a whole week. As you can probably guess by the fact that I’m relating this anecdote, his WoW account was compromised and stripped because of that one week window."
The hackers are primarily companies that sell in-game gold for money. All it takes is visiting an infected site that is exploiting a known or unknown vulnerability. It can be as innocuous as a malicious ad that finds it's way into a legitimate Diablo fan site. They know you play Diablo. Boom, account credential stolen.
Read the whole thing. It's valuable insight.
Source: http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/scary-facts-on-d3-account-hacking -
https://www.symantec.com/avcenter/reference/StealingVirtualAssets.pdf
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/virtual-money-real-money
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/hhosr-roundup-march-2007
Be sure to look at that last one.
And note the date on all of these. It's only gotten worse since then.-
More directly answers your question : http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/making-money-china-through-malware-0
An example of this threat is Lingling (Lingling means zero-zero inEnglish). Lingling was spread by hackers using SQL injection to place asmall HTML IFRAME within hacked Web sites. These IFRAMEs would causethe browser to load Javascript that contained a variety of InternetExplorer exploits that eventually downloaded and executed Lingling. Thehackers behind Lingling appear to be the same as those who placed anIFRAME in the Dolphins Stadium Web site in the Superbowl infectionto download a similar executable. Once Lingling is installed, it waitsfor you to play World of Warcraft and then scans memory for yourcredentials and sends them off to the hacker.
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http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1139962-Authenticators-and-security?p=17007893
A report from Symantec in mid-2007 stated that WoW accounts were more valuable on the black market than stolen credit card numbers, in part because you're less likely to get the cops coming after you if you steal a WoW account, but in part because the value on a WoW account is fairly easy to strip. (I'm sure this is still true, but haven't seen a more recent reference.) D3 accounts have a similar benefit/drawback.
Given that, it should be no surprise the lengths hackers would go to make Blizzard specific keyloggers and malware.
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quick someone photoshop that quote onto his photo
http://distilleryimage0.s3.amazonaws.com/250f70ce85ec11e1af7612313813f8e8_7.jpg-
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