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World of Warcraft: Battle.Net Dial-In Authenticator
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
The Blizzard Entertainment development team has introduced another tool for players to prohibit unauthorized access to one's account. Called the "Dial-In Authenticator", it is not a physical USB device or a mobile phone application. Rather, it is a free opt-in service that monitors accounts. If an potentially unauthorized attempt is made to log into a player's account, a player is asked to provide more information via an 800 number.
If you sign up for the Battle.net Dial-in Authenticator, you will be asked to make a toll-free phone call from a specific phone of your choosing to authorize unusual login attempts with the associated Battle.net account. Please note that you will only be asked to make this phone call when something about your login attempt appears out of the ordinary. For example, if you were to log in from a location from which you do not typically play, you may be asked to call in and provide your selected PIN and a unique, single-use security code before access to the account will be granted.
Read more here and then check out the Dial-In Authenticator FAQ.
Comments
Handy! But can they do something about the Fake WoW Emails?
that sounds like it would get annoying, My account was haxored by gold sellers all the time. I wouldn't to call a number 294086792437592 times. I finally gave up and canceled my sub. authenticator or not.
another good tool, would LOVE for them to solve the fake emails though... so confusing.
buy the key-chain one. it's like 6.50
This is a great idea. like stated above the key-chain one is cheap to keep your account 1000times safer, and if you got an iphone,itouch,android,blackberry whatever. just download the app for FREE
sucks that neither my phone (LG Xenon) or my wife's (Corby Pro) support the mobile app.
how to know if its real or fake. Obvious random spacing, mispelled things, sometime contain invisble letters when highlited they are shown, highlight over link but don't click and see if the address matches what the link says (if fake will not); Easy way, show what domain it came from if it didn't come from (battle.net)/(blizzard.com)/ with exact spelling. then its fake.
If ur using gmail u can show domain easily from who it came from, i just changed email, and i filtered @hotmail.com to spam, all my bliz scams go there.
v
How to filter out fake emails. DONT USE HOTMAIL, Tell ur friends to stop. and filter out @hotmail.com (really 90% of the scams come from hotmail)
I use Gmail and it catches about 99% of fake WoW emails that I receive and tosses them in the spam folder. Every so often one sneaks into my inbox, but they're always linking to a very non-blizzard site. I particularly love the ones that tell me I've been selected for the Cataclysm beta opt-in... seeing as how I haven't signed up for the beta... that would be pretty miraculous!
My advice is whenever you get a WoW email that looks authentic, close the email, then go to the WoW or battle.net website and log in directly... not from the link in the email. If there's anything you need to know about your account, it'll be in your account management page.
There's nothing Blizz can do about the fake emails, all you can do is learn to protect yourself from them.
Never argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level, then beat you with experience.
Account theft prevention: Use Firefox, don't go on gold buying sites, don't go on mysterious websites and download stuff (rely on popular add-ons from curse), change your password frequently, use a seperate e-mail address for your battle.net account so that you only get official Blizzard e-mails, if you are currently receiving scam e-mails; make a new e-mail because you are already on the gold seller's spam list. Most importantly: Do NOT tell ANYONE your password. "Someone who is your friend today, may be your enemy the next."
If you follow these easy steps, you should be perfectly fine.
How on earth could a gaming company possibly stop spam/fake emails from coming to your email account? Honestly, what would you have them do, monitor your inbox?
No shit lol, im actually thinking about calling bliz up and having them delete my account. because im really sick of deleting 10-20 fakes a day.
Deleting your b.net account won't make someone who got your email address suddenly stop spamming you.
I haven't done it yet, but others have recommended opening an email account that they use only for their Battle.net accounts and nothing else, and say this pretty much stops all the spam and scam. It's certainly worth a shot since email accounts are free.
The security method described in this article should NOT be used to replace the Authenticator!
You should have at least a 2-part security system for your Battle.net account (or any account you wish to be secure that you can have that level of security), a REALLY GOOD password AND an Authenticaor. This is another layer of protection, not a replacement for those things.
Kudos to Blizzard for establishing another way to prevent account theft.
Have played: Everquest, Asheron's Call, Horizons, Everquest2, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall
Krappy part is Bliz knew that their battle.net system was easyer to hack. It was a move to sell the Authenticator imo. kinda funny how Bliz moves the the new system where you are required to merge your WoW account with BN and at the same time Authenticators come out. I played for almost 4 years with NO issues and as soon as they went to BN I was hacked 3 times in 6months,and 2 of my buddies were hacked with in the same time frame as well.
I play games to enjoy them,not to sit there and jump threw hoops just to log in lol. Whats next your Social Security number,ohh wait maybe the will come out with a combo securtiy system Authenticator-cator. or maybe a 1800 number to unlock you authy.
people are really stupid, i have Google Chrome (latest stable) and WOT and AdThwart, so i just visit the pages from the e-mail for fun, and Chrome blocks them
if people are this stupid to believe this e-mails are true, then these people are not to be allowed to live among others... O_O
and if someone is still using Internet suXplorer...
:D:D ahahahah! or Firefox without AdBlock and WOT... how stupid he is... or havent tried Chrome...
P.S. i dont even have a WoW account on Battle.net (i have on private servers though) and i still get the e-mails to give away my Battle.net account, which i dont even have
i paste the the blocked info from Chrome in response to these fake e-mails and they stop sending them to me
ahahahah
one time i started swearing at them from the bottom of my soul ;D
^^
The only way your account gets hacked is if you give out your log in name and password or use a weak password. Learn to mix letters, numbers and capital letters in your password, it becomes very hard to hack at that point. Hackers are lazy, they won't take the time to discern a strong password.
Don't give passwords out to friends either.
Funny, I think Blizzard is watching what banks do. I have this feature on my bank account,
been there done that. Never clicked on any hyper links from bliz. went to goggle/addressbar/book marks to get to the account site.
In the ID'ing fake emails/phishing emails here are 2 quotes from bliz.
There are a few things to look for when determining whether or not an email is legitimate.
Emails from Blizzard Entertainment will originate from an @blizzard.com or @battle.net address.
So, if the sending address of an email is showing as @blizzard.com or @battle.net, then the email is definitely legitimate?
Actually, no. Even if you receive an email from an @blizzard.com or an @battle.net address, it's still important to remain cautious. This is because it's possible to change how a sending address appears in the "From" field of an email. The process is known as "spoofing" and may cause a phishing email to initially look like it's been sent by Blizzard Entertainment.
a link to the support site so im not accused of taking pharses out of context. ;^)
http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=25133&pageNumber=1&searchQuery=e+mail
This service sounds like a Credit Card Fraud Prevention Program. Where credit card company allows certain number of charges per day that once exceeded, they freeze the card until you call in and verify that you are the one using the card.
To see that Blizzard is offering this service is to suggest that many accounts are being brute forced. Also shows that the Authenticator is a good idea that is now obsolete. :P
Ready for GW2!!!
A) The authenticator was released a year and a half before the battlenet merger.
C) Battlenet isn't getting hacked, YOU are.
D) Many companies are moving to increased security with devices like this, because there are so many retards who keep getting repeatedly hacked and must find someone else to blame for their problems.
It is posts like this that feed the misinformation about account hacking.
Thank you for making your reply. I love how everyone seems to believe that they could not possibly be at fault for getting hacked.
Here's a related anecdote:
I had a number of guildmates who also got hacked soon after the BN switch. However, every single one of them eventually figured out how the got keylogged. Most of them downloaded the keylogger version of the curse auto-updater, which became a real problem right around the time of the BN switch. Each of them are far more careful now and have authenticators. Not a single one of them claimed it was blizzard getting hacked, they all realized there was something on their system and made the appropriate actions to remove the problem and prevent it from happening again.
All blizzard does in terms of hacking is that they have some bad apples in the company that sell logins to farmers so they can try and bruteforce them. ie: If your password looks like 51053 (your zip code) or ilikeapples, you are a retard and will get hacked.
The only way to counter that would be to hide the email from the employees which in turn would make customer support even more tedious, requiring playing to know the last 4 digits of the registration code for 1 of their games, having to validate that number constantly. Even then, your email is probably at 10000 other places on the web and they'd eventually get it.
Quite frankly, i'd rather they sell authenticators and let the smart crowd get support faster when its needed.
I sometimes wonder how people can make assumptions that have no basis in fact from an article.
This change in no way implies the Authenticator is obsolete, it is in fact the most secure method of protecting your account. I have not heard of one instance of someone with an authenticator account getting hacked.
Blizzard is just introducing another safeguard if you don't want to use an authenticator.
OK ill give you the part on the Authenticators being out before BN,but whos not to say that the move to BN was to sell more Auty's. And i know its not my fault for getting hacked as I have NEVER clicked on any hyper link in my emails or used the curse auto updater,so that leads me to believe its not on my end,but some where else. The whole point for me at least is the 2,3,4 steps you have to/should take to make AN account secure.Lol its more steps than setting my security alarm at home >.0. to me its just to much hasle,thats just me though.
yup email can be spoofed, you may see an bob@blizzard.com or accounting@battle.net address, but be careful, it may not be them.
someone suggested giving blizzard one email address, and use anothe for everything else. thats a good start, but even then, be careful.
You obviously have no idea what it would take to brute force just one account from a remote login to the game servers and how easily it would be detected and stopped. Even the most basic forms of account security would lock out an account after a set number of failed login attempts.
Why would hackers pay money to blizzard employees for email addresses when they already have millions of them. If they were brute force attacking the servers at blizzard why bother sending out phishing scams to those emails?
They phish, because it is easy to trick users into giving up their login information, click infected links and it takes almost no effort. They don't brute force, because they would go out of business before they cracked even one account.