It was a figure of speech. He mentioned in the same paragraph that if a person could hack into Blizzard's databases containing account information, then they would have access to credit card numbers, which gives them access to a virtually unlimited amount of money.

While I believe the chances of Blizzard's internal security being compromised is extremely low; I suppose it could be possible that the credit card details are held in a different, more secure database, making getting the account information the only way of getting anything.

Again, I agree, practically zero chance, but if we're going to consider all situations.

Have a happy new year everyone!

To make things a little easier on your poor little brain, he was basically saying that it wouldn't make sense for some one to steal an account from blizzard when said person could just steal credit card info. Trying to take an account with the intent of selling epics and stealing gold is much more time consuming and less rewarding than getting a hold of someone's credit card.

Simple solution... Make a text file, put your password in there... and COPY it by highlighting and pressing Ctrl + C.

Now, open WoW... type in your USERNAME... then go to the password field and hit Ctrl + V to PASTE the password into the field. You've just thwarted any Keylogger you might have, since they just got a big log of Ctrl + V

If you play at multiple locations... just email your password... to yourself. When you go somewhere else, bring up your email... and do the same things listed above.

I got hacked ONCE... since then i've used this method and never had any issues. Norton, Mcaffee, all the AntiVirus software is crap when it comes to WoW related keyloggers. They just don't find them reliably enough or you need to scan while the WoW client is running to have a hope of finding them running. My computer had every security hole plugged 2 years ago that could be plugged without making me unable to connect to the interweb ;) I still got hacked, and now I use the method listed above... no problems whatsoever.

The issues came from Internet Explorer having that vulnerability that allowed attackers to compromise a machine.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms08-078.mspx

While 'game passwords' were also targeted, the issue was much bigger than just getting access to your WOW account.. people were able to access your entire machine and all the data on it.

The issue was fixed, make sure to patch your Internet Explorer (or use Firefox). Since IE is widely used, a lot of WOW players were affected by it, ergo Blizzard started recommending their way of dealing with the issue..

This is not related to Blizzard being hacked, this is related to users navigating to compromised websites and getting exploited. End of Story.

Problem with e-mailing it to yourself is what if your e-mail is compromised to? Key logging allows all kinds of information to pass between clients. Speaking from experience, chances are good if you have been key logged, they have more information than just your wow account. My particular nightmare included having my e-mail compromised, and the transfer requests deleted as I tried everything to get control of my account.

@ Cleaved

That is a myth..

keyloggers read the Memory and / or Packet stream for user input. Saying that copy/pasting your acount creds twarts keyloggers creates a false sence of security and is therefor more harmfull then helpfull...

A Sys Admin.

Seconded. The copy/paste method simply DOES NOT work. Emailing your password to yourself is an awesome way to get hacked though.