World of Warcraft Phishing Scam

I am a web services specialist, and can spot a phishing email a mile away. However, I am confident that if I was actually a player of World of Warcraft, I would have fallen for this scam.

I just received the an email from wowaccountadmin@blizzard.com and it was not sent to junk

The email was very well designed, it looks exactly like an automated confirmation email that you get after changing your password on a site. The foot of the email contains correct contact details for Blizzard.

I followed the link to the WoW website wondering what was going on, as I don't have a WoW account and never have. I was assuming that someone was playing using my email address and was a little intrigued. I certainly didn't expect it to be a phishing email.

The only reason I noticed that the URL was not what it seemed, was because I clicked the 'fogotten password' link and was taken to a 404 page.

If you get an email like this, Look VERY carefully at the URL, and make sure you don't get fooled into logging into the web page with real details. It's a very clever spelling mistake, designed to take advantage of the way we actually read things.

The scammer was - however - nice enough to provide you with the contact information for blizzard, that you will need in order to try and recover your account after they have stolen it.

When you read a paragraph of text, you do not actually read every syllable of every word. When reading something quickly, as long at the letters are correct at the start and end, the order of the other letters does not matter as much, as long as they are present.

This url is very clever in that it takes advantage of this fact. If you get an email saying that your password for an account on any website has been reset, and the email looks exactly what you would expect a password reset email to look like, then you are highly likely to click the link in the email.Especially if you have not actually just reset your password.

Always doublecheck the URL before you respond to an unexpected password change email.

Since writing this hub, the amount of Blizzard / Warcraft / Battlenet spam has increased dramatically.

Most recently I have received spam emails entitled 'Cataclysm Beta Opt In'trying to steal an account by offering fake access to the development of Cataclysm. No doubt they will continue to change.

If you ever receive an email from Blizzard - or any other game company - offering a new service, mentioning problems with account security, bannings etc open up google, type official world of warcraft website or official blizzard website and ensure that you visit the right site