The good folks over at Blizzard's official World of Warcraft forums have provided a very useful checklist of how to avoid keyloggers who are even sneaky enough to hack Blizzard posters. Check out the tips enumerated by WoW forum poster Lythria, and you better take heed - WoW player or no - since the following preventive measures can be used for securing your most personal information online.

Being careful with the links before you click on them is very important, as many people fall prey into clicking links that activate keylogging scripts. One of the things you can do is to make sure the link will lead to a well-known site (such as Photobucket) by hovering on the link and checking out the status bar at the bottom of your browser.

Another thing to do is installing some browser add-ons that help prevent the running of scripts, such as Mozilla Firefox's "NoScript".

Lythria will update her post from time to time as more ways of detecting/avoiding keyloggers are found, so its better to check the Via link to catch the updates yourself.

 

Need even quicker access to The Warcraft Armory? If your sudden affinity to task shortcuts has you drooling for faster access and searches over Blizzard's main database for World of Warcraft, then quick add-on solutions are available to your perusal. Actually, it's available with conditions: if you've got Mozilla.org's Firefox browser as your Internet surfing tool.

Though there are many search engine add-ons available at Mycroft search engine dev page for Mozilla, there's just a few that function well. One for example was coded by a player for World of Warcraft, though it seems Blizzard may have their own official version in the works.

"It's actually being worked on at the moment, keep an eye on the armory page. It should be going up within a day or two," said community manager Drysc, keeping care not to drool on the poster below. Okay, we were kidding about the last part.

Aside from that single statement though, there isn't much else to go by, so we'll just have to wait for developer updates in a few days or so. In the meantime, you may want to try out this WoW player-contributed search engine add-on, provided via the Read link below.

The World of Warcraft Public Test Realms (PTR) is reportedly experiencing problems with its character copy page. Going into further details about this matter, Lilianara over at the WoW forums reported that Firefox 2.0.0.3 was unable to access the PTR character copy page, with users being greeted with a "Server Busy" error every time they attempt to enter. The bug problem was picked up by the Blizzard dev team and have sent this reply via blue-poster Nickjs:

Hello Lilianara,

The account management page is currently experiencing some issues and the appropriate teams are working to resolve it as soon as possible. In the meantime, please continue to try and successfully copy the character. We do apologize for any inconvenience.

With regards to Nikjs' advise for users to try to find ways to work around this problem, Lilianara provided this work-around:

1. use IE to go to the char copy page (i didnt get the error 1 over several hours of testing)
2. Use the Firefox mod, IE tab or IE View to render the page in IE inside Firefox. (didnt get the server busy error using this method over my testing.)   

That's all to report for the moment - the workaround should help until Blizzard can properly fix the reported page issue.

Members of the World of Warcraft boards have detected what appears to be a keylogger over at the Icecrown boards. According to Madhava's explanation over at the posted thread, here was how the detected trojan worked:

Its not meant to fool the interceptor, Its meant to fool people. It disguises what website you are actually going to by using those escape functions. Firefox refuses to follow those links (for good reason), but I'm not sure about IE. My computer is pretty secure but I don't want to risk running that site on Internet explorer.

The hijacked site has an embedded link to malicious javascript hosted on a Chinese server. That javascript attempts to exploit the ANI exploit and the Iframe exploit to load a trojan named 'test.exe'.
'Test.exe' is detected by most antivirus as a trojan:
Trojan-PSW.Win32.Agent.im or Trojan.Agent.im
Basically a password stealer for WoW and maybe a backdoor.

Just a quick heads-up for any passing WoW gamers, all the more as keylogging incidents are becoming more rampant. Now, in case the guys here are wondering as to how to protect themselves (and their prized characters) from getting hoodwinked, make sure to check out the various security measures being circulated for your benefit. Play safely.

Flukes submitted this JPEG screencap to Digg which could be funny, freaky, or downright furiously worrisome, depending on where you stand in the online privacy debate. Here's what Flukes has to say:

The linked screenshot provides proof that WoW developer Blizzard is actively scanning players' browsing history and cookies. Early speculation is that this is a countermeasure against cheaters, but players are arguing that Blizzard has no right to access this highly private data.

(You will note with great trepidation that the next thing the program checks after the temp files is the Cookies folder)

Not knowing what Blizzard's reasons are for checking your computer's internet history, all everyone at Digg and here can do is speculate. Beyond jokes of (and we quote) "Worried about Blizz finding out about your (just use the sickest imagination you've got) pr0n collection?", there are some very serious repercussions from this.

One theory being strung out at Digg is that the game's actively looking for the computer having visited sites Blizzard frowns on for one reason or another. A more benign reason is that WoW could simply be saving cache files from the news ticker, or from the program's launcher, which is why it's accessing the temp folder. Could be an anti-scam thing, too. Of course, those are the benign reasons - who wants to speculate on the more overtly provocative ones?

But again, no one knows why, and Blizzard didn't say anything about this before. And a lot of people in Digg are seriously miffed and are, not to mention, switching to Firefox - unless WoW's designed to look in there, too.