207diggsdigg If you are the leader of a guild that has a large number of people who have account security issues, you regularly get emails from Blizzard that say the following:

Recently one of the members of your guild was the victim of an account compromise, and during the course of our investigation it was discovered that items were removed from the guild bank while the account was out of the control of your guild member. The items have been returned to you as attachments to an in-game mail. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

The email lists what items were restored and that they are attached to an in-game email sent to your account. (You then probably insist the hacked guildie get an authenticator.) Recently, The Spousal Unit received a bit more from the GM helping him with a security incident: a zombie survival guide. The full text of the guide is after the break.

Recently, Polar over at Securing WoW wrote about the latest phishing email being sent out by scammers. Account thieves are using the 2010 Arena Tournament as a way to lure you to their site to steal your login info. (Registration for the tournament ended on the 27th continues until June 7.) This is typical behavior by these crooks. Every time a Blizzard event is announced or even rumored, from the Cataclysm alpha to the StarCraft II beta, scammers take advantage it with legitimate looking emails. With the Cataclysm beta almost upon us, the expansion related phishing is going to get even worse.

But there are also the tried and true emails that are being sent out daily, regardless of upcoming events. They spoof their email so that it looks like it is coming from Blizzard and fill the email with legitimate links, making their info-stealing site link look real. Also, the links have misspellings which are hard to catch at a quick glance, (like "starcratf2" or "worldotwarcraft") and lead to sites that look very much like the official ones.

Blizzard has an excellent resource for protecting yourself from phishing attacks. In general, if you get an email that looks legitimate, type battle.net in your browser's address bar (spell it correctly). This will take you to the correct site for your region and there you can see the status of your account yourself. Some examples of phishing emails are after the break.