Blizzard

Gamers woke up to an unpleasant surprise on Sunday morning when hackers brought down Sony's PlayStation Network by way of a distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attack.

Two gamers have filed a class action lawsuit against Blizzard Entertainment, claiming that the developer has improperly guarded player information leading to several security breaches and leaked account data.

The suit also accuses Blizzard of fraud, claiming that the company "negligently, deliberately, and/or recklessly" fails to protect users' details. Referring to Battle.net once again, the suit claims that the site encourages you to purchase an Authenticator for $6.50 (£4.08) which generates passcodes every time you log in to further safeguard information.

Even the most devoted Diablo III fanatic will probably have a hard time arguing that the game is as compelling once you've reached the level 60 cap and are stuck looking for increasingly rare legendary gear just to get your stat advancement fix. Those late game junkies won't have to suffer through withdrawal much longer, though, as Blizzard has announced a new Paragon system that adds 100 more levels of potential character advancement on top of the current cap.

The silver lining in Thursday's news that hackers extracted significant user information from online gaming empire Blizzard was that passwords were protected by an encryption scheme the company said is "extremely difficult" to crack. We reported that the use of cryptographic "salts" made it "extremely unlikely" that plaintext passwords could be derived from the cryptographic hashes. Security researchers, including those at Sophos and Intego, agreed.

Confined to a forum thread, a Blizzard staff representative responded to the article we recently ran about the dangers of joining a public game in Diablo III. According to Blizzard, public games are safe. Session spoofing is "technologically impossible" and authenticators are the best bet to safety. 

Diablo III’s first week hasn’t been an easy one. With an overwhelming number of server issues, rumored battle.net account hacking, and the slow start of the game’s real-money auction house, this launch isn’t going too well on Blizzard’s side — though Diablo did sell 3.5 million copies on its first day.

So, you know how there was this whole thing about having an official Blizzard authenticator meant you weren't going to get hacked? Well, turns out you can still get hacked even with an authenticator. 

Originally, Blizzard mentioned that accounts they investigated that had been hacked/infiltrated/compromised did not have authenticators attached beforehand. This led many in the forums to post rebuttals that most of the hacking occurring was due to player negligence and that they were not properly protecting themselves.