I play WoW at work occassionally (contractor - so not paid between clients). Recently the place I work at have told me to stop playing because they are petrified of the computers being hacked and their data being held for ransom.
I have no addons (just the BattleNet launcher and WoW) and usually just do dailies at work occassionally.
Is it actually possible for hackers to get into system, solely because I’m playing WoW?
I doubt it (I could be wrong with my limited knowledge), without you doing something particularly silly.
Either way, if it’s your employers network then I would agree to what they need. Even if they happen to be incorrect on this particular subject.
If it’s your own network (ie: laptop mobile net/phone tether) then it’s not even possible. Only you are at risk.
Wonder if they got that idea from the Criminal Minds season one finale where Penelope got hacked playing an MMO at work?
The Battle.net app and WoW are secure. They only affect the executables they’re supposed to affect (themselves essentially). Addons additionally work within the Lua sandbox Blizzard created to operate within WoW. They removed any ability to control external functionality years ago, and that functionality consisted mainly of iTunes integration/control.
You are no more insecure playing WoW than browsing the internet. Security is essentially in your hands. I could see if they were scared of something like say, Valorant, which is a rootkit and is always on, but Blizzard has no such software and is completely benign. You won’t get malware through the Battle.net platform. You get it most often from browsing to shady sites and/or sites whom refuse to work with reputable advertising networks and downloads from less then reputable places.
You’re fine.
No.
no u cannot be hacked “through” wow
Nope, they can’t be hacked “through wow”. Nobody can send you malicious code in-game that will compromise your work’s network. There is a teeny tiny chance, that Blizzard could get hacked, and the hackers could insert malicious code that nobody would notice and you could update the game and get hacked, but you’ll probably get hit by lightening and win the lottery before it happens.
I’ve heard rumors there were some keyloggers or other sinister addons at some point in time, but i don’t know for sure. Installing ANY other third party software, curse, wowhead, literally ANY other software does increase your chances, but again, someone would have to compromise those sites, and their software, and you would have to update to the malicious code. It’s much more likely your work mates would fall victim to phishing or something else completely unrelated to WoW.
Good luck with this though, it’s very difficult to explain things to those who aren’t literate. If they are really that scared, you might wanna suggest they backup their data periodically.
Others have answered your question but I agree with Skozzah.
If it makes your employer uncomfortable, then just don’t do it.
Not worth it, imo.
They’re probably just saying that because they just don’t want you playing games there, a potential hack just seems like a good enough excuse to use without seeming like they’re being the bad guys.
I would just point out that battle.net, like almost all software, has had a handful of security vulnerabilities discovered (and fixed) in it over the years.
The risks may be very low, but they are not zero.
Better watch out. They can hack you thru time.
Back in the day, gold selling websites had keyloggers. Basically everyone who bought gold would eventually get hacked.
get an authenticator.
it can.
the question is, are you important enough for anyone to go out of there way to get it.
The only way in hell you could be hacked through WoW is if you stupidly click a link provided to you by someone you do not know which puts you in a web browser. If all you’re doing is popping on and doing dailies, and not being dumb, no you cannot be hacked.
They want you to stop playing while working. They are saying that so, when they fire you, they have a legit enough sounding reason.
Id say no unless blizz installed a trojan or opened a backdoor through the bnet in which case everyone here is at risk.
Some exc probably opened a phishing email or got virus from a shady p site blamed it on people using company net to look up stuff/playing games etc as the cause.
I’d be more worried about a key logger on your work computer stealing your WoW account info.
I mean, if they were running a packet sniffer (and somehow getting it around Warden) a nearby player could probably associate a range of net-facing IPs with your character name, since you have to share relative coordinates at minimum to render each other in the world.
It’s probably considerably harder to do this since WoD implemented CRZ, though, since you can’t just listen in on a particular port range associated with a single server anymore. And you’re still essentially anonymous, so unless they hack Blizzard first they won’t be able to identify you and specifically target your company’s servers this way.
In truth, domain info is publicly available, so this isn’t anything a l33t h4xx0r can’t find on his own much more easily if he’s that determined to do a cyber attack. It doesn’t let them see past your outermost router in any event, but you might get DDoSed if you steal some vindictive script kiddie’s fishing node. Granted, this would manifest as an ISP problem, but TBH, you’re probably going to be blamed for outages if you persist anyway, regardless of the truth of the situation.
I doubt they can hack your computer through WoW unless you have some suspicious third party stuff.
I just bring my own computer to work.
This is the more likely scenario. I see so many people post about playing while at work. They must have supervisors/bosses who are oblivious. If my employer caught me even looking at my phone, let alone playing a game, I’d be given a warning. If it happened again I could kiss my job goodbye.