WoW game screenshots show digital watermarks (userID, time, realm)



    Users of the OwnedCore gaming forum have discovered hidden watermarks that are automatically embedded in JPG files if you take a screenshot in the game World of Warcraft. If you take a screenshot of a clean area, open the file in IrfanView or some editor, sharpen it with the maximum filter setting, repeat the procedure several times, you will notice an obvious pattern that repeats itself many times.

    Users have already written a program that automatically extracts information from watermarks. This is unencrypted ASCII text containing the username, time taken to take a screenshot to the minute and the IP address of realm, including private servers .

    Thus, if you got an original screenshot from the WoW game, then you can restore the name of the user who made it, the time it was taken, and the coordinates (realm). This is probably what Blizzard needs to investigate any incidents involving the illegal sale of digital goods, the sale of accounts and other violations of the rules.

    Program for decoding graphic files: ImageToBinary.exe

    Another program in C # (requires .NET 4.5): WatermarkTool.rar



    Java program for extracting a digital mark
    import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
    import java.io.*;
    import javax.imageio.*;
    public class ReadWatermark 
    {
        static final int pWidth=352; // Pattern width
        static final int pHeight=240; // Pattern height
        static final int pxWidth=4; // Bit width
        static final int pxHeight=5; // Bit height    
        static final int bWidth=88; // Bits table width
        static final int bHeight=48; // Bits table height
        static final int Black=0xFF000000; // Black = 0
        static final int White=0xFFFFFFFF; // White = 1
        static final String filenameSrc = "pattern.bmp"; // Stores the filename
        public static byte[][] getPatternBits(BufferedImage image)
        {
                byte barcode[][] = new byte[bWidth][bHeight]; // Stores the bits
                    for (int y=0, i=0; y=0; i--)
            { // Print the pattern (1 row here is 1 column there, right to left)
                for (int j=bHeight-1; j>=0; j--)
                    System.out.print(barcode[i][j]);
                System.out.println();
            }
        }
    }

    As you can see, among the WoW players there are many literate guys. They examined their archives and found that hidden code has been embedded in screenshots since at least 2008 (Patch 3+) when Blizzard was acquired by Activision.

    You can look at the code in your screenshots by taking a screenshot with quality less than 1-9, and launching one of the above programs.

    /console SET screenshotQuality "9"

    So far, it has not been possible to make a tool that extracts watermarks from screenshots with quality 10, as well as from screenshots in the lossless compression format TGA. Watermarks may not be there.

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