On my research about „Warden“ (Blizzards anticheating tool, that monitors a players system for suspicious processes) I stumbled over the „Governor„, a monitor tool that shows which action is performed by warden. I know this is old news for some, but the awareness of the base of players is not very high about this. Considering the amount of 59.000 banned accounts this june I figured it was worth some mention,
„This software is known as the ‚warden client‘ – it’s written like shellcode in that it’s position independant. It is downloaded on the fly from Blizzard’s servers, and it runs about every 15 seconds. It is one of the most interesting pieces of spyware to date, because it is designed only to verify compliance with a EULA/TOS. Here is what it does, about every 15 seconds, to about 4.5 million people (500,000 of which are logged on at any given time)“
Hoglund, author of the Governor, says he watched the warden „sniff down the email addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs, including those that were minimized or in the toolbar“
Further Information can be foun in this article on P2P.net and on the Homepage of the Governor.