This is very close to the complaints I once heard about using the swipe card technology that is used at many companies to keep buildings secure. I can remember working at one company where the employees would prop the door open, complaining that keeping track of id cards to open doors was too much trouble. But that was some years ago. Most of the places I’ve worked in the past few years? All use similar card swipe-door opens system. (And one of those was a government job.) So, perhaps this keyfob system will take a similar warming up period.

“People do online banking and stuff like that all the time. That stuff doesn’t suffer from keyloggers and the like”

Hacking occurs in all systems, and techniques used to hack Wow accounts have been used for other theft. Security folk will admit that systems are breached – but tell you that their job is to make sure that it’s quickly stopped and more importantly not made public. And DEFCON is a very informative convention if you want to learn more about this kind of thing, and perhaps get a job in system security.

For anyone else who’s interested, here’s the direct link to the Authenticator on the Blizzard Store (US): http://www.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=1100000182

You can get ones which are a lot more robust, but you’re talking $20, not $4

Just so you know.

Depending on what kinds of security systems the people at Blizzard have access to, the keychain idea might have seemed more intuitive. Maybe the developers themselves use them to log into their coding software. I still can’t help raising an eyebrow at the fact that they’ve chosen a method players have to pay for.

Article at http://lukesneeringer.com/entry/how-blizzard-could-end-account-hacking/