How To Avoid Being Hacked!

A huge amount of players are having their accounts compromised at the moment.  It is more important than ever that you are careful with your account.  Treat it like you would a bag stuffed with cash.

Here are some tips to avoid becoming a victim of account theft.  This guide is always available on the menu on the left hand side of this site!

Run PC Security Software
It is vital that you run an up to date anti-virus, anti-spyware, and also a firewall at all times.  Windows XP and later comes with a free basic firewall, which is good if you don't have anything else.  You can get full PC security for FREE!

Zonealarm is a fantastic free firewall which you can download here.

For a free antivirus and antispyware, AVG is hard to beat, and you can find this here.

Run Windows Update
An essential step for Windows users is ensuring Windows Update is run at least weekly.  In the Control Panel you can set Windows Update to run automatically, saving you the worry.  We strongly advise you to do this as fixes for Windows security issues are sent via this method.

Be wary of emails.
A popular technique with scammers and account thieves is to send emails, on mass, which panic a player into providing their account details.  A few tips on avoiding this:

- Blizzard NEVER ask for your password.  Any email asking for this is fake.
- Blizzard NEVER warn about a pending ban.  They ban first, then tell you about it.
- Always check the senders address in the header of your email.  A lot of emails have a spoofed sender address.

A helpful guide on spotting these can be found here
If you are at all unsure, post on our forum and we will take a look for you.

Check web addresses
A hugely successful recent scam involved a fake armory website that looked very similar to the official one, but when you entered your account details you had your account stolen.

The following are official Blizzard EU websites:

Battle.net website - http://eu.battle.net
EU Armory - http://eu.wowarmory.com
EU Website - http://www.wow-europe.com
Blizzard Website - http://www.blizzard.com

A lot of fake emails and websites use what look like real addresses, but these are spoofed.  By hovering over the link you can see in the status bar at the bottom of most browsers where the link really goes to.

Be wary of fake whispers
Another popular scam is where a player whispers you in game pretending to be a Blizzard employee, and asks you to visit a website.  Blizzard will never whisper you with the normal chat pane.  All Blizzard chats are in a special window, and GMs are clearly marked with a "Blizz" Logo next to their name.

Be careful to use only genuine addon updaters!
As long time wow players will know, some addon providers offer automatic addon updaters.  Curse offer the most popular of these.
The Curse Client is targeted a lot by hackers.  They make malware infected ones and then make sites that look like Curse to fool you into downloading them.  They use sponsored Google ads to make sure their site appears at the top of the list.  

There is only one place to get the Curse Client:  http://wow.curse.com/client
Do not download it from anywhere else!

Buy an authenticator
The best thing to be safe is to of course follow the above and be safe, but also to purchase one of these.  They are the best way to keep as safe as possible.  3 versions exist

- Physical device.  These are from http://eu.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=221003617
- Mobile device.  These are cheaper, and for a lot of mobile phones. http://mobile.blizzard.com
- iPhone/iPod Touch.  This one is 100% free from the iTunes store.

A helpful guide for running the mobile authenticator on other phones than the ones listed can be found here

Simply choose the best one for you, and off you go!

If you do happen to get compromised, our help guide will help you get back on your feet.  However, hopefully this will help you avoid the issue in the first place!

Blizzard have also recently put together a good mini site about security http://eu.battle.net/security/index.html

Keep Safe!