Warden Client

From Blizzard's New MMO Wiki

Blizzard has made use of a special form of software known as the 'Warden Client'. The Warden client is known to be used with Blizzard's World of Warcraft online game, and the Terms of Service contain a clause consenting to the Warden software performing these scans while World of Warcraft is running.

The Warden client scans the process names, window titles, and a small portion of the code segment of running processes in order to determine whether any of these third-party programs are running. The goal of this is to detect and address players who may be attempting to cheat in the game. As World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online game, the actions of a few cheaters can greatly affect the experience of the rest of the game's community. This determination of third party programs is made by hashing the scanned strings and comparing the hashed value to a list of hashes assumed to correspond to cheat programs. The Warden scans all processes running on a computer, not just the World of Warcraft game, and could possibly run across what would be considered private information and other personally identifiable information. It is because of these peripheral scans that Warden has been accused of being spyware and has run afoul of controversy among privacy advocates.

The Warden's reliability in correctly discerning legitimate vs illegitimate actions was called into question when a large scale incident happened when many Linux users were banned after an update to Warden caused it to incorrectly detect Cedega as a cheat program.Blizzard issued a statement claiming they had correctly identified and restored all accounts and credited them with 20 days play.

The Warden is not the first time Blizzard Entertainment has been accused of attempting to inspect customers' computers. In 1998 Blizzard Entertainment had a class action lawsuit filed against them for "unlawful business practices" for the action of collecting data from a user's computer without their permission.