Blizzard Entertainment has confirmed a security breach compromised a large amount of user account data for Battle.net gamers.
Although Blizzard, best known for its PC games Diablo and World of Warcraft, has stressed that the hacked information alone isn’t enough to crack into accounts, it is still recommending that all Battle.net users change their account passwords as soon as possible.
The hackers gained access to a database of ‘cryptographically scrambled’ passwords protected by the SRP protocol, which is a key-based authentication system. Blizzard has stated that anyone trying to crack the passwords would have to decipher each passcode one by one.
Battle.net account holders can log in and change their password by clicking the ‘Account’ link at the top of the page, then selecting ‘Settings’ and ‘Change Password’ from the drop down menu.
As we’ve seen with Wired reporter Mat Honan, a compromised account can snowball across connected devices. So if you have a Battle.net password that is the same as any other accounts, you should probably change them as well.