Forum :: Lounge :: Security information for WoW players

Anyone who plays WoW: If you have any screenshots that can be viewed publicly online anywhere that have been taken since Cata dropped, delete them immediately. Blizzard has taken the liberty of "watermarking" them with sensitive information such as your character names and the names of other characters viewable in the screen, your CPUID and HDID and your running processes, as well as other, currently unknown things. There are tools that are being developed that will be able to retrieve this information, so it's highly recommended you delete them as soon as possible.

If you would like a link to the original post that documents this discovery, let me know and I will PM it to you, not sure if it should be posted here.

Edit: A link to the original topic is here.

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May he now rest under aegis of mirage -
As the sands slowly turn to Elysian fields

It can and it should.

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Wish upon a star!

There's gonna be a lot of angry nerds lol.

Several people got together and successfully decoded the watermarks. These watermarks do not contain any overly personal information, that is channeled to Blizzard directly. The watermarks contain your Account ID (which is different from your account name), the time of the screenshot and the IP address of the server you are connected to. The idea being presented for this is that it is mainly a way to track people who have released screenshots of things while in a NDA. Although this is nowhere near as bad as originally thought, it's still sort of underhanded on Blizzard's part and they could've done it some other way.

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May he now rest under aegis of mirage -
As the sands slowly turn to Elysian fields

Syran posted: (11th Sep 2012, 07:38 pm)

Several people got together and successfully decoded the watermarks. These watermarks do not contain any overly personal information, that is channeled to Blizzard directly. The watermarks contain your Account ID (which is different from your account name), the time of the screenshot and the IP address of the server you are connected to. The idea being presented for this is that it is mainly a way to track people who have released screenshots of things while in a NDA. Although this is nowhere near as bad as originally thought, it's still sort of underhanded on Blizzard's part and they could've done it some other way.

Ah, well I hope no one loses their stuff over this. Getting hacked sucks donkey balls.

Soulbanisher posted: (12th Sep 2012, 03:08 am)

Syran posted: (11th Sep 2012, 07:38 pm)

Several people got together and successfully decoded the watermarks. These watermarks do not contain any overly personal information, that is channeled to Blizzard directly. The watermarks contain your Account ID (which is different from your account name), the time of the screenshot and the IP address of the server you are connected to. The idea being presented for this is that it is mainly a way to track people who have released screenshots of things while in a NDA. Although this is nowhere near as bad as originally thought, it's still sort of underhanded on Blizzard's part and they could've done it some other way.

Ah, well I hope no one loses their stuff over this. Getting hacked sucks donkey balls.

This is why you click onto desktop and hit print screen and then go into paint rather than use it in game. Also, even if people did get hacked I doubt they would care since the population of WoW is estimated to drop at least 8% of active users. Not a proven fact, but many people are not liking the new updates.

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Former multi-server mapper.

The information that can be taken from the screenshots is of no use to anyone but Blizzard. I just think they could've done it a different way. And I haven't seen anywhere that 8% of the WoW population is supposed to drop. Since the latest patch a lot of people have actually changed their opinion about the expansion and are excited for it. As always, numbers will explode when the expansion drops and slowly start falling after that, with a boom every time a major patch is released.

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May he now rest under aegis of mirage -
As the sands slowly turn to Elysian fields