Blizzard Sued Over Authenticator And Security

We give our financial information to several game publishers and we trust them to keep the information secure. This is usually only an assumption that can never be 100%. We take it for granted that they would have a system in place to secure the sensitive information. Unfortunately we also report several times a year, if not more in 2012, that hackers find a breach in almost every system. Blizzard is no exception. Today, pair of gamers filed a lawsuit against Blizzard for failing to secure information and selling authenticators.

Blizzard sued over security and selling Battle.net authenticators

According to the report here Blizzard has been sued by gamers being accused of failing to properly secure player accounts and then asking them to purchase Battle.net authenticators.

In the lawsuit, gamers claim that Blizzard is negligently, deliberately, and/or recklessly fails to properly safeguard player information, which has resulted in repeated security breaches. 

Yes, they even use the word "deliberately". They claim this because Blizzard is selling Battle.net authenticators to players to generate codes that players must enter to log in to an account from a new computer. Meanwhile, mobile authenticator is also available for smartphones, with the iOS version being free of charge.

The suing players claim that Blizzard has made roughly $26 million through the sale of Authenticators. 

OK let's stop here for a moment and ask ourselves a question. Do you think Blizzard could not come up with a better security system for $26 million? Couldn't they have spent the money on a better security system instead of forcing players to buy additional software to further secure their accounts. That would be true if this was the actual case. However, the authenticator is free of charge and it is optional as far as we know. Players still have the option to buy the hardware authenticator. But then it's only optional. 

We will be keeping an eye on a response from Blizzard over this lawsuit and it will be really exciting to see how this ends. We can only hope that, with 10 million subscribers, Blizzard should definitely handle its own security system properly and not let such lawsuits in the future. 

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