Anti-bot software example from WoW

[itsmarty]

Here's a fairly interesting article about "spyware" being installed by Blizzard along with their World of Warcraft game. Their interest in stopping cheaters very closely mirrors the poker sites' desire to stop bots.

According to the article it "sniff[ed] down the email addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs, including those that were minimized or in the toolbar." More at Article at Rootkit.org

Martin

[MarkGritter]

This is why I run all my poker clients inside VMware sessions.

[Ryan11]

Wow very interesting. I play WoW and this is quite alarming. I'm going to decompile the source code and take a look myself.

[waffle]

It sounds like it scans all the titles of all open windows, computes the data through a one way hash, then compares the hashed data against a known set of offending hashes/fingerprints. Same thing for the few bytes in memory space. If so, this isn't as egregious as a violation as some people are making it out to be (in other words, they're not sending your personal info to blizzard).