Blizzard Entertainment Reports Breach

Gaming company Blizzard Entertainment, publisher of the popular game World of Warcraft, has reported a breach of its Battle.net servers, affecting gamers worldwide. Battle.net is a centralized service used to access games.

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In an FAQ posted to its Battle.net website, Blizzard explained that unauthorized and illegal access into its servers allowed gamer information to be viewed. For gamers worldwide who link to the company's North American servers, e-mail addresses, security question answers, cryptographically scrambled passwords and other additional authentication information were accessed.

Blizzard didn't disclose how many user accounts were affected.

"At this time, there's no evidence that financial information of any kind has been accessed," the FAQ explained.

Michael Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard, said that the company uses secure remote password protocols to protect users' passwords, "which is designed to make it extremely difficult to extract the actual password, and also means that each password would have to be deciphered individually."

In a statement, posted to the Blizzard site, Morhaime said, "As a precaution, we recommend that players on North American servers change their passwords."

Blizzard will notify affected players soon about changing their security questions and answers through an automated process. "Additionally, we'll prompt mobile authenticator users to update their authenticator software."

The company also warned users about phishing e-mails that could result from the breach.