The developers at ArenaNet have posted a new status update for players of Guild Wars 2, informing players about their acknowledgement of the account security problem and the recent rash of hacks that have seen many players lose their game accounts.
According to the studio, hackers have acquired “lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts.” The breach, says ArenaNet, comes not from the game itself but from external sources.
“If your current password isn't unique to Guild Wars 2, change it today! Do not under any circumstances use the same password for Guild Wars 2 as you do for your email account. We've observed hack attempts against hundreds of thousands of accounts that don't even exist.”
To prevent hackers from gaining access to newly created accounts, ArenaNet will now disallow passwords that have been previously used in a hack attempt, to prevent whatever bruteforce library of passwords the hackers have from working twice.
The support team at ArenaNet is also prioritizing hacked accounts because of the serious problem they pose over other support requests, so players who’ve had their accounts stolen will be able to recover them within 48 hours and not a moment longer.
