Blizzard Authenticator

Thanks to BBB for this. You can read his post on the issue.

Blizzard is releasing "soon" - who knows when that will be - a keychain thingbob. What it does is you activate it for your account. And then when you try to log in, the keychain will generate a random password for you, that is synched with Blizzard. I don't know how it works. I won't pretend to know how it works. I also won't plagerize BBB. At least not without quotations!

"When you set it up with your Blizzard account, it will ’sync’ it’s internal seed generator with Blizzard. So when you try to log in, you will be directed to input your current code… you’ll press a button on your keychain dongle, and the code will be generated right then, viewed on the dongle screen display, and only be valid for a very short time, perhaps a minute. And you’ll type it in. Blizzard will have their seed synced to yours, so it’ll know what it should have been…
So even if you had a keylogger, or a virus… the key you typed in goes dead a minute later." -- Big Bear Butt Blogger (Q4T except for the typos I fixed. For shame, man. There was a 'teh' in there. Where's your sense of pride? I can forgive the Blizard and the rpess and wqhat. But teh?)

So, no more account hacks (hopefully, but I bet hackers will be busily trying to figure out a way around it) although it sounds like a hassle if you lose your keychain thingy. For someone like me, it's a two edged sword! Nice security. High risk of me forgetting it or losing it.

Just passing along the good news.