Post by Federalagent
Actually, the system that wow uses to check for hacks etc
is spyware. It scans more than just your wow.exe, and that's why it's classified by virusscanners as spy/malware. Still, Blizzard won all cases against them about this so I don't see the problem.
It is called Warden, and is only active when the game runs. Its not considered Spyware, its considered Security software and Anti Theft protection. I have never heard of any scanner detecting the warden as a falsepostive..
Enough do. And even tho it only runs during the game, it's still classified as Spyware. Just no one cares because everyone knows a big company like Blizzard won't abuse it.
Not true. Look at the definition of
Spyware... says
Spyware is a type of malware that is installed on computers and collects little bits of information at a time about users
without their knowledge.
Malware, short for
malicious software, is software designed to infiltrate a computer system
without the owner's informed consent.
So, the fact that
Warden is known, at least to those that actually read the TOS, and it is not malicious in any way, it is not Spyware. IT does not spy on you without your knowledge. While it does collect certain information, it in no way can identify what is exactly on your computer.
The only place Warden is classified as Spyware, is from the word of some company called "
Electronic Frontier Foundation", which has no majority voice. They only classified it as Spyware back when WoW was in its Beta testing, and had no informative information in the EULA (TOS).
The things Warden currently looks for in-process includes but is not limited to:
- Exploitative model edits
- Known cheat modules (DLLs)
- Known modifications to game functions
- Known cheating addons
- Speedhacks
- Known API hooks from cheats
The things Warden currently looks for out-of-process includes but is not limited to:
- Known cheating drivers (rootkits)
Blizzard has said that Warden does not gather any personally identifiable information about players other than the account being used. It also states that the data collected is only used for finding evidence of malicious programs and cheating.
So in fact, if you want to classify it as anything, it would be an Anti-Malware software being it checks for software that is spyware or malware.