Hey everyone!  Hope you all had a nice New Years!

On New Year's Eve, Guild Portal had a huge outage, mostly due to their vendor not doing what they should have in terms of data storage, backups, servers, etc.  They worked tirelessly to get us back up and running, but finally had to back us up about 2 weeks.  Luckily for us, not much was posted in the last couple of weeks, but we did lose things like our last 2 approved applications, their introductions and birthdays.

So if you see either of our newest folks in game (Akira or Malaya), please tell them to fill out another quick one and I will approve it right away so they can have access to the site again.

I had a couple other posts I did when I came back that I will need a couple of days to recreate.

For future reference, if you ever see the site down, please check their Facebook site.  They were awesome at updating us there:  GuildPortal Facebook

A huge congratulations out to Josar, the newest member of our officer team.  Josar will be taking up the mantle of all things PvP!!

Also congratulations to Zarann (Mark), Kaatey (Jackie) & Discobandit who were promoted to the Noble rank tonight.  Zarann & Kaatey have also volunteered to take on a few tasks to help us as we venture forth into Mists.

If any of you are interested in becoming an officer or even helping out in a non-officer capacity, be sure to let Pyxia know!  We can certainly find a place for willing hands.

And finally, I would like to personally thank everyone in the guild.  With the tireless help and support of the entire guild, I was finally able to get the rogue legendaries tonight.  You are the best guildies anyone could ask for!

I figured it would happen sooner or later, but there was a security breach at Blizzard.  Make sure that you login to your Battlenet account and change your password.  Since the answers to the secret question were also taken, Blizzard will be prompting you in the coming days to change those through an automated process.  

Just make sure you are always on an official Blizzard site and do not follow links in your email.  I am sure there are already spoof emails out there to try and get your password through nefarious means.  Email addresses were taken, so expect some spam emails.  

I have an email address solely used for my battlenet account, but as a precaution, I will be creating a new one this week and using that one as my battlenet email.  I highly urge everyone else to do the same.

If you use the mobile authenticator, please update your software.

What data was affected?
Here's a summary of the data that we know was illegally accessed:

North American-based accounts, including players from Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia
Email addresses
Answers to secret security questions
Cryptographically scrambled versions of passwords (not actual passwords)
Information associated with the Mobile Authenticator
Information associated with the Dial-in Authenticator
Information associated with Phone Lock, a security system associated with Taiwan accounts only

Accounts from all global regions outside of China (including Europe and Russia)
Email addresses

China-based accounts
Unaffected

At this time, there’s no evidence that financial information of any kind has been accessed. This includes credit cards, billing addresses, names, or other payment information.

The full announcement is below:

Important Security Update

Players and Friends,

Even when you are in the business of fun, not every week ends up being fun. This week, our security team found an unauthorized and illegal access into our internal network here at Blizzard. We quickly took steps to close off this access and began working with law enforcement and security experts to investigate what happened.

At this time, we’ve found no evidence that financial information such as credit cards, billing addresses, or real names were compromised. Our investigation is ongoing, but so far nothing suggests that these pieces of information have been accessed.

Some data was illegally accessed, including a list of email addresses for global Battle.net users, outside of China. For players on North American servers (which generally includes players from North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia) the answer to the personal security question, and information relating to Mobile and Dial-In Authenticators were also accessed. Based on what we currently know, this information alone is NOT enough for anyone to gain access to Battle.net accounts.

We also know that cryptographically scrambled versions of Battle.net passwords (not actual passwords) for players on North American servers were taken. We use Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP) to protect these passwords, which is designed to make it extremely difficult to extract the actual password, and also means that each password would have to be deciphered individually. As a precaution, however, we recommend that players on North American servers change their password. Please click this link to change your password. Moreover, if you have used the same or similar passwords for other purposes, you may want to consider changing those passwords as well.

In the coming days, we'll be prompting players on North American servers to change their secret questions and answers through an automated process. Additionally, we'll prompt mobile authenticator users to update their authenticator software. As a reminder, phishing emails will ask you for password or login information. Blizzard Entertainment emails will never ask for your password. We deeply regret the inconvenience to all of you and understand you may have questions. Please find additional information here.

We take the security of your personal information very seriously, and we are truly sorry that this has happened.

Sincerely,
Mike Morhaime

First of all, I would like to thank Malisar for agreeing to serve as Raid Coordinator for our WoW Chivalry guild.  For those new to the guild, he served as an awesome raid leader for us before going on hiatus this past summer.  Now that he is back full time, I couldn't be more happy he has decided to take up those reins again.

Right now he is assessing our current raid capabilities to see what we need to get us raiding again.  If you have any interest in raiding with us, please take a moment to read the following post & reply: Hear Ye, Hear, Ye!

Just a reminder that Super Fun Night is on the calendar for this Saturday!  It starts at 9:30pm server time.  All you need is a level 80+ toon & a sense of fun!

Sign up here. 

As a reminder, here is the fun we got up to last October in our fun night with VEA. 

If I get at least 10 signups, I'll fraps it & make another video!