Woops! Guild Wars 2 Accounts

“It may be time to gird your loins and beef up your passwords again, as yet another online game’s security has been compromised. Guild Wars 2 has received more than 11,000 support requests for hacking, but it appears that the game itself wasn’t targeted. Rather, ne’er-do-wells gained passwords from other sources like fan sites, and matched them to Guild Wars 2 accounts.

While it may seem obvious for some users, the attack was apparently enough to flood ArenaNet with reports of hacked accounts. Ars Technica reports that the company received about 8,500 such e-mails over the weekend, and then roughly another 2,500 on Monday alone.

The company said that one particular fan site that recently came under attack was a source of the passwords, but it’s “just one of many apparent breaches of other games and web sites that hackers have been collecting email addresses and passwords from.” One user in Europe reported 10 e-mails about someone trying to access his account from China. He says the verification procedures in place have rendered those attempts unsuccessful.

“If you don’t want your account hacked, don’t use the same email address and password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve used for another game or web site,” said a statement from ArenaNet. “Hackers have big lists of email addresses and passwords that they’ve harvested from malware and from security vulnerabilities in other games and web sites, and they’re systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts.” They advise using long, randomly generated, unique passwords. Which, really, is just a good idea in general.”