According to president Mike Morhaime, ”This week, our security team found an unauthorised and illegal access into our internal network here at Blizzard. We quickly took steps to close off this access and began working with law enforcement and security experts to investigate what happened.”
“At this time, we’ve found no evidence that financial information such as credit cards, billing addresses, or real names were compromised. Our investigation is ongoing, but so far nothing suggests that these pieces of information have been accessed.”
It seems that the data compromised was a list of email addresses for Battle.net users from North America, and gamers who use the North American servers from Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, excluding China.
Fortunately, Morhaime stressed, ”Based on what we currently know, this information alone is NOT enough for anyone to gain access to Battle.net accounts.”
Battle.net passwords are cryptographically scrambled, so even if they were compromised, hackers wouldn’t be able to decipher them. Morhaime still advises gamers use Authenticators with their Battle.net account, and change their passwords just to be safe.
”We recommend that players on North American servers change their password,” he cautioned, ”Moreover, if you have used the same or similar passwords for other purposes, you may want to consider changing those passwords as well.”
