If you have a Guild Wars 2 account, you’d better play it safe when responding to emails and digging around the web for cool game information. Thanks to a massive phishing email scam and the compromising of a few “unknown” fan, sites hackers have already taken over thousands of Guild Wars 2 accounts and reduced them to digital rubble.

At last count, over 11,000 accounts had been compromised. But ArenaNet has confirmed that they’ve received 8,500 new reports in just the last three days—not sure if those are in addition to or including the ones we had before.

The primary culprit? Users, actually. Thanks to people using the same username and password combo for their emails, site logins and Guild Wars accounts, hackers are having a field day. The ArenaNet team has a very simple recommendation for protecting your account from theft:

“Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords taken from other games and websites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts. To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you've never used anywhere else.”

ArenaNet also confirmed that they’ve seen “hundreds of thousands” of brute force attempts to log into Guild Wars accounts that don’t exist, meaning hackers are blindly testing whatever information they can find. 

So, keep your passwords varied and your usernames unique. And hey, why not upgrade that old anti-virus of yours while you’re at it?

[Edge]

Tweet

This story sucks? This story rocks!

Vote Now!    (0) (0)