Accunt ID in Screenshots, be carefull

joj0r · Sep 12, 2012

could be good to know for account seller etc.
just found about this thread, it worth reading i guess

http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/wor...l/375573-looking-inside-your-screenshots.html

took from ownedcore

Dear everyone

This post may have been moved to WoW General, but it still remains an exploit - one which is used against us...

1) Go somewhere where there aren't any (or a lot) of textures. I used the druid blink bug to go to the north end of the world but you should go below Dalaran in Crystalsong Forest, as bluesius suggested, because you will get a better screenshot if you stick your face in the pure white trees.

2) Type:

/console SET screenshotQuality "9"

Make sure you use 9, not 10.

3) Take a few screenshots of the clear, no textures, white area by zooming into a tree and hitting ALT Z, so that your entire screen is white.

4) Open this image in an image editing program like IrfanView (it's freeware), click CTRL+E, select the Sharpening filter, use the highest possible sharpening value (99) and click OK. Now do this two more times, again: CTRL+E, Sharpen 99, OK.

5) You are now looking at your character's WoW watermark / custom bar-code / qr code look-a-like / call it what you will:

Apparently, each character has a different set of these repeatable patterns, which contain account and realm information, and it looks like if they are scanned by software that recognizes them, they can reveal our character's account name/id, the time of the screenshot and the the full information of the realm, including its IP address (think "private servers").

The pattern, which consists of approximately 88 bytes of data, repeats itself many times depending on the resolution of your screen. See below for a colored representation: the account id and realm information are depicted in red and the current time (seconds not included) is depicted in blue:

IMPORTANT NOTE: IF YOU CAN'T BOTHER READING ANYTHING ELSE, READ THIS:

The secret watermark which is being intentionally embedded inside WoW generated screenshots below top quality, DOES NOT CONTAIN the account password, the IP address of the user or any personal information like name/surname etc. It does contain the account ID, a timestamp and the IP address of the current realm. It can be used by hackers to link alt. characters to accounts and target specific spam or scam attacks, and it can be used by Blizzard to track down private WoW servers.

Based on Blizzard's ToS (http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/legal/wow_tou.html), Blizzard is allowed to communicate information about our hard drive, CPU, operating systems, IP addresses, running tasks, account name and current time and date. It never mentions anything though about embedding some of these data into every screenshot we capture using the WoW printscreen tool. The users assume that Blizzard will use a safe channel via battle.net, not our public screenshots that we share with the world, unaware of their secret contents. This unencrypted watermarking mechanism fails to protect our privacy, not from Activision employees (they already know everything about our computer systems), but from malicious hackers looking for something or someone to take advantage of.

The contained information can be easily recovered and decrypted by hackers (if we did it, so can they). For example, someone could use this to identify which account holds which characters and perhaps stalk and annoy its user, or help perpetrators choose their phishing victims with a more targeted approach. They could unleash Web spider bots scanning for WoW screenshots, decode their hidden watermark data and quickly create a comprehensive database of which account has which alts in it, that they can then sell to anyone interested (information is power). Perhaps someone is already using this since the watermark has been around for at least two to four years already.

It looks like Activision Blizzard has teamed up with Digimarc (http://www.digimarc.com) to provide us this wonderful service of secretly tagging our in-game screenshots with our account and realm information. Although it has not yet been verified, it is possible that Blizzard is using an automated monitoring service which downloads image files from various Internet sites and checks them for the presence of their embedded digital watermark data, kindly provided by Digimarc: http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US7653210

_Mike, schlumpf and Master674 have managed to disassemble the watermark data and help us verify which pieces of information are contained inside. Do note that this covert watermarking has been confirmed, by multiple sources, to have started some time between 2008 (Patch 3+) and 2010 (Patch 4+), which is after Blizzard was acquired by Activision, so you may want to delete/remove from the public domain all your post-WotLK screenshots captured by WoW.

Also note that if your screen resolution is too high, the pattern will look something like this:

Click to expand...

alsoforgotmyusernamenpass · Sep 12, 2012

This is incredibly old news.

joj0r · Sep 12, 2012

alsoforgotmyusernamenpass said: ↑

This is incredibly old news.
Click to expand...

the thread there was started 3 days ago
and i posted it cause i don't think eveyone have know ths
(i didn't know this before)

alsoforgotmyusernamenpass · Sep 12, 2012

Personally I found out because I posted that I had purchased Cataclysm on an old WoW account day of release on another forum and a Mod edited my post and told me to repost the image with the account name blocked out.

joj0r · Sep 12, 2012

alsoforgotmyusernamenpass said: ↑

Personally I found out because I posted that I had purchased Cataclysm on an old WoW account day of release on another forum and a Mod edited my post and told me to repost the image with the account name blocked out.
Click to expand...

please look at the forum link i posted and look at it
this is not what i'm talking about

edit: quoted the thread here

Marows · Sep 29, 2012

alsoforgotmyusernamenpass said: ↑

Personally I found out because I posted that I had purchased Cataclysm on an old WoW account day of release on another forum and a Mod edited my post and told me to repost the image with the account name blocked out.
Click to expand...

you're an absolute derp. rofl.

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