WoW reads your hard-driveBlizzard has power over your PCBy Nick Farrell: Friday, 16 November 2007, 8:15 AMORC-FEST World of Warcraft software ships with DRM software which could give the company control of your hard-drive, a gaming site claims.According to Onwarden, Blizzard's latest WoW patch made changes to its polymorphic Warden software making it more powerful.In the past WoW's Warden functions could be checked by third party gamer software which could make sure that it did not get out of control.However the latest Warden patch includes a different random cryptographic hash function in every copy, apparently used for cryptographic key exchange.This makes it impossible for the third party software to work and, according to Onwarden, is a security hole in its own right. A hacker, or even Blizzard itself, could use it to retrieve information from a computer at random. The only thing stopping Blizzard from doing this is the goodwill of the company.All it would take is for Blizzard, or a rogue employees to decide to have a look at a punter's computer and they could do it.Onwarden claims that a resourceful Blizzard employee could install a virus or other malware on your PC, and have a pretty high chance of that going undetected by the customer.The fact that the new Warden patch makes it impossible for third party software to see what Blizzard is up to means that it is almost impossible for users to tell what is going on.That is not to say that Blizzard would knowingly and willingly break any law.
