Guild Wars 2 and Hackers: How To Secure Your Account

Mike O’Brien, who is GW2’s Executive Producer and who is also President of ArenaNet, has posted a nifty overview of account security.

It covers everything from:

– two-factor authentication (they were working on a mobile app but have chosen to change direction and go with Google Authenticator instead)
– password strength (surprise, surprise, people still set lame passwords)
– fighting hackers (they have 20+ million passwords on a blacklist that hackers have attempted to use with particular email addresses – you won’t be able to use these passwords if they are linked to an email that a hacker has tried. It’s reduced hacked acocunts from 1.5% to 0.1%)
– database breaches (they haven’t had any – yet)
– hitting the hackers where it hurts by not buying gold from third-party gold sellers

You can read the full post here – it’s not just for the noobs and has some interesting insights.