Danger Will Robinson!

I saw this screen shot last night on the WoW LJ community, and I have to admit, it took me by surprise. This is the first time I've ever actually seen the World of Warcraft launcher/load screen come out and point-blank warn people about the presence of Trojans on their machines. As there are a lot of variants of this particular Trojan out in the wild, that specific name doesn't surprise me.

Considering the fact that two Blue accounts were recently compromised, it looks like it's a good time to once again make sure your systems are patched, your virus scanners are up to date, and that you've got some good lines of defense against these Trojans. (Personally, I'm a huge fan of FireFox and some of the browser extensions that have come out for it.) Or, as some of my friends have told me, I could just get a Mac, and not have to worry so much about these kinds of things either. I keep telling them I'll happily switch when they buy me one.

While I know many people have been concerned about what Warden is doing on their systems, I will say this much -- if it is getting to the point where it can/will save people from being hacked in the first place, then they can scan my system at WoW startup all they want to. I've seen several guild mates lose their stuff (one as recent as a few days ago) and at least two cases where no restoration of their gear was possible. Not to mention all the time you lose waiting for everything to get sorted out, and the fact that you were at the very base of it all, robbed of your hard work and time.

Since the most common program I run in the background with WoW is either Rhapsody or Winamp, Blizzard is more than welcome to scan my machine for Trojans or anything else with a nefarious intent that might be out there. The worst thing Blizzard would be able to accuse me of currently (considering what's running when I'm generally playing) would be having really strange taste in music. And I'd have to answer "guilty" to that.

And for anyone who is facing this particular error message -- for some reason I only found good information from Blizzard on how to handle it on the EU version of the FAQ. The link for those interested is right here.

[via the WoW LJ]