A while ago, World of Warcraft players were forced to merge their accounts in to new Battle.net accounts. These Battle.net accounts can hold several Blizzard accounts. In my case I now have 5 different WoW accounts merged in to one login, including a mix of US and EU accounts.
My StarCraft II beta code came through a few months ago so I decided to log in to my Battle.net account to add the code. As I tried to log in, the site unexpectedly asked me for an authenticator code. Blizzard authenticators are devices that are associated with a Battle.net account that produce a code that you have to type in to the web site in order to log in – you may use a similar device for logging in to your online bank account. As I hadn’t associated an authenticator I was very confused.
I rang Blizzard Europe and discovered that my account had been hacked and that the hackers had associated their own authenticator with my account, preventing me from accessing it. After they were happy with my identity, they removed the authenticator from my account and advised I associate my own. They then also advised me that one of my US accounts had been banned and that I had to ring Blizzard US to explain the situation.
To protect my account from further security problems, I decided to download the official Blizzard Mobile Authenticator to my iPhone and used that. Problem solved, right?
Nope… There has since been a software update for this little iPhone application that has caused it to wipe it’s settings. This has basically once again left me locked out of my account. I’ve tried contacting Blizzard Europe by e-mail but I’ve had no response yet. I’ve tried by telephone and they’re so busy that they’re not even accepting new calls in to their queuing system!
The most annoying thing of all is that the login name for Battle.net accounts are e-mail addresses. So if you tend to use the same password for various things, such as forums, and someone gets hold of that data then they can look at your e-mail address and the password you used and just use that info to log in to your Battle.net account.
If I can’t rely on the authenticator to work properly then the best idea is going to be to change the password to something I don’t use for anything else at all, and also make it relatively complex since the username doesn’t need to be guessed at all!
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