Damn thieves

Those thieves, I swear. Ars Technica reports an unrevealed Guild Wars 2 fansite has been compromised and, using the information from it, hackers have been at work tearing apart accounts for Guild Wars 2. The resulting wave from compromised accounts resulted in over 8,500 support requests related to the hacks over the weekened. Most have had service restored by now.

Oddly, this seems to be based on some kind of campaign from hackers primarily located in China. One user reports their account being attacked one day after she bought the game. And I'm sure I don't need to tell you about the frequency of World of Warcraft hacks. Hell, my own account was hacked and banned from the game three months after I quit.

The China-located login has been fortuitous, though - ArenaNet sends out emails when people log into their Guild Wars 2 account when it's from a new location, and unless you're an exchange student, you're probably not in China suddenly. I'm not sure how much help password protection offers, especially in this instance, but it never hurts to try expanding on a password's length and complexity, or getting a password managing program.

Hopefully ArenaNet will go the path of Blizzard and create an authenticator program. Fans have been begging for it, and Arenanet usually listens.

Julian "Mirai" Williams