Securing your battle.net account

[J_Th4ng]

There have been some news posts lately about people having their battle.net accounts hacked, and all of their D3 items and gold stolen. Not good news for anyone. As a result, Blizzard have recommended that everyone get themselves an authenticator for their account, and to sign up for a service called SMS protect.

You can sign up for these things on your account page at b.net if you haven't done so already. I highly recommend that everyone do so, you wouldn't want to have all of your lovely loot stolen!!

Incidentally, there are Authenticator programs for both iPhone and Android, I'm not sure if it works for BlackBerry though. I'll try and post back.

Info one each of these:

Physical Authenticator: http://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/battle-net-authenticator-faq
Mobile Authenticator: http://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/battle-net-mobile-authenticator-faq
SMS Protect: https://eu.battle.net/account/management/mobile-alert-dashboard.html

Also, I'm having a little difficulty with SMS protect. When I enter my Mobile number for them to send a verification code to, the SMS never arrives. It does say that you shouldn't enter your country code, and it does state that my country is ZAF, so I would expect it to work. I've tried entering the number both with and without the leading zero (i.e. 082******* and 82*******), and neither seem to work. Anyone else had success with this?

UPDATE: I've successfully installed the mobile authenticator from the BlackBerry app store. Still not having any luck with SMS Protect though. Anyone else got this working?

[TygerBS]

Why you using SMS protect?

[J_Th4ng]

Why you using SMS protect?


If you read the original post, you'd see that I'm NOT using SMS protect, because I can't get it to work.

The reason I'd like to get it working, is that you can configure it to send you an SMS whenever you log in to your account. Useful to know if someone else logs in to my account.

[TygerBS]

I did read your original post, i am asking why do you want too?

If you have the authenticator, then you should be fine.
Are you that worried about it?

Will check mine tonight.

[J_Th4ng]

I'm not that worried about it, no. But it's an additional level of security that they wouldn't have added unless there was benefit to it?

Also, by default, the authenticator only asks for a code about once a week, not every time you log in. So there would be an opportunity for the account to be hacked in between authentications. Having SMS protect would at least let you know that someone had logged into your account.

[Megageth]

Got the SMS verifier to work using 072 blah blah blah.

[Phatso]

Good on you for posting this J. Sorry I haven't had time to post this.
At the very least, you guys should DL the mobile authenticator. I don't think the SMS service is really important.
The last thing you want to do when logging on is to see 0 gold and your character sitting nekkid. If this happens, do not panic. Contact customer support immediately and they are VERY helpful.

Another security tip I have: Create a separate email address for your Battle.net account. The rationale behind this is that the more places you enter your email address associated with your Battle.net in, the more likely the database is to get compromised and potentially targeted. If you’ve already done this, fear not, you can change your primary email addy if want to.