Dear curse.com,
I am glad to see your site is back up and running again :) Php can be a *** some times lol, like a second wife u don't need...

I have a Question for the owner or a designer of add-ons listed within curse.
I am a big fan of WOW and me and my 8yo daughter play it avidly but in recent events i have been worried about weather or not i should even be using add-ons...

I recently had a Question brought to my attention last night while i was in OL about add-ons and the usage of them.
Now i cant live without the QuestHelper, or Bagnon to tell the truth...

But in light of all the hackers UI,add-ons to scam/hack peoples accounts makes me wonder how can we be sure the add-ons we download from this site are in fact secure? I would love to download some more add-ons but i am concerned.
"My good wow friend" got hacked soon after she installed this add-on from lets just call it a "unknown wow mod site" referred in wow from a player and lost all of her money equipment and mounts the next day...

Now i don't want to sit here and complain, but i have been a 3year subscriber to wow and recently started using add-ons to help my online play like most people here and hate to think that all the hours i spend Questing and AH Sales will all be for not. So how can i protect our accounts from this sort of thing?

Is there any warning signs to look for when downloading, beside the version of it?
Any feedback will be greatly appreciated thanks.

Well that is great to hear i always read the feedback and editor notes but it's always best to ask a advid curse.com person...
Plus i did not want to give up my QuestHelper lol.
And no she did not DL that add-on here i recommended her to come here but a lvl 70 told her i was a fool and she went to this uk site.
She did get her account back and all her inventory but the mounts i believe.

Well thanks for the reply.

Hi Darkeness,

I am an engineer at a company that manufactures and sells one of the top three firewalls today. I'm afraid my answer won't give you complete peace of mind, but it should help you feel safe in some respects.

The real answer is that some of the things people call "mods" are dangerous and some are not. And if I call a mod dangerous I don't mean that it is harmful, but rather that it is relatively easy for someone to make it harmful, whereas some files are much harder to make harmful. The easiest example is a photo or picture in some format like .jpg, .gif, etc. A file like that is extremley difficult to make harmful and thererfore pretty much "safe".

Here's a good rule of thumb to use when considering a Wow mod. It all depends on how the mod works. If unpacking it in the interface/addons directory and checking the box in wow is all you need to do to use it, you can pretty much figure that the file is safe. It would be very unlikely that someone could engineer a way to use that mechanism to do anything other than what Bizzard intended them to do. HOWEVER, if the mod requires you to do anything else, ESPECIALLY if it requires you to "run" it, either either to install it, before you run wow, during wow, or if it launches wow, then that is a file that is very easy to make harmful and is dangerous. Unfortunately this would include programs like the Curse installer, any of the third-party database clients (thottbot, allahkazam, wowecon, etc) and anything that ends with .exe, .com, .bat. Also, any Active-X controls that attempt to load while you are viewing wow web sites (or any site for that manner) are potentially harmful.

So to sum up, files that you just drop in the interface/addons directory and WOW does the rest are safe. Files that are going to do stuff for you outside of WOW are dangerous.

I hope this helps.

-Cowisimoo/Darkspear

play offline game and don't delete your save games aahahhaha

Wow, there sure is a lot of misinformation going around..

> So to sum up, files that you just drop in the interface/addons directory and WOW does the rest are safe. > Files that are going to do stuff for you outside of WOW are dangerous.

This about sums it up. Thanks dchevrie.

I'd change this line here:

Files that are going to do stuff for you outside of WOW are *POTENTIALLY* dangerous.

I myself wouldn't install another executable, with the exception of the wowaceupdater and the curse client. It would have to be a very big name for me to trust it.