Nasty WoW beta phishing

I just got an email inviting me to the WoW Mists of Pandaria beta. Rather strange, given that I have never played World of Warcraft in my life. Furthermore, it was sent to the email address I used to subscribe to MMORPG.com, not the one I used with Blizzard.

I saved the email and checked the HTML. It looks like it's going to some place called change-dragon.tk which will then likely redirect to Blizzard's account page inside a frame. In other words, you'll go to Blizzard's account login but you will likely be watched while you log in so somebody can steal your account/password.

The only other real tip-off I can see in this email is that the trademark symbols got replaced by question marks. That's one NASTY attack!

Anyway, I figured I would send out a heads-up. Most people likely didn't use different email addresses for Blizzard and MMORPG so this wouldn't be so obvious.

Unfortunately e-mails like this are very common. I've gotten dozens of phishing attacks trying to get into my WOW account. I don't even open 95% of the e-mails claiming to be from Blizzard, and any e-mails claiming to offer a beta invite are met with extreme suspicion. I'm pretty sure that this is standard practice for any WoW player.

When I got into the D3 beta I almost didn't participate because I was so suspicious of the e-mail. Usually the phishing e-mails are really easy to identify though because of the numerous grammar and spelling errors.

Yeah, I see those false Blizzard spams all the time, too, but this one seemed particularly well worded. Apparently that's because it's a copy of the real beta invite. They just swapped out the link to the account page.

Maybe Blizzard needs to stop putting links into their emails?

Zloth said:

Yeah, I see those false Blizzard spams all the time, too, but this one seemed particularly well worded. Apparently that's because it's a copy of the real beta invite. They just swapped out the link to the account page.

Maybe Blizzard needs to stop putting links into their emails?

Click to expand...

Ah yeah but I don't see how they could be expected to come up with something that my bank realized about a decade ago.

Ah that is a little nastier then.

Personally what I do is when I get a beta invite from Blizzard I never click on the link. Instead I go to Blizzard's Website and activate the beta there. That way I know for sure that I'm not being phised.

Zloth said:

Yeah, I see those false Blizzard spams all the time, too, but this one seemed particularly well worded. Apparently that's because it's a copy of the real beta invite. They just swapped out the link to the account page.

Maybe Blizzard needs to stop putting links into their emails?

Click to expand...