A new secondary market

Last week, Blizzard revealed their Blizzard Authenticator, a new hardware device which can be tied to your World of Warcraft account as an extra security measure. The principle is simple: when you use the Authenticator, it generates a unique number that's different each time and you need to input this number along with your user name and password when you log in to your account. Some users of online banking application may recognize this system, as it is similar to what some of these tools use to authenticate their users.

The idea behind this is that while it's relatively "easy" to get someone's user name and password when you have some sort of keylogger on their computer, it's virtually impossible to get access to this unique number, since you need physical access to the Authenticator device.

Anyway, the little gadget seems to be a success, even though it's completely optional. As you can see when you click the link, the Blizzard online store already ran out of them. The device was also for sale at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational, but after only a couple of hours on Saturday, they were sold out. It seems Blizzard was just testing to water and they were not prepared for the demand. If nothing else, it proves there's a secondary market for anything that has to do with account security and it wouldn't surprise me if other MMOG publishers or even third party manufacturers are going to announce their own version of the Authenticator soon. And they'll be a success.