Guild Wars 2 Account Breaches Impacting Thousands

Guild Wars 2 has been a target of ne’er-do-wells ever since launch day. Using a list of emails and passwords leaked over the past year or so, hackers have been targeting Guild Wars 2 en masse, using the lists to “crack” unsuspecting players’ passwords.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the hackers have been doing this to great success. In a recent update, developer ArenaNet warned players that hackers have already breached the accounts of more than 11,000 players, and the numbers are growing substantially every week.

In case all of the talk of hacking has you suspicious, ArenaNet insists that the account breaches aren’t the result of the developer’s own servers being hacked. Again, hackers are using lists from other recent security breaches, publicized or otherwise.

“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,” ArenaNet said in an update over the weekend (via Ars Technica).

The Guild Wars 2 account breaching problem is growing worse, but it can easily be prevented. Users should use a completely unique password for Guild Wars 2, regardless of whether the email used to sign up for the game was used anywhere else–just to be safe.

Hacking may be a fairly big deal in the world of Guild Wars 2 at the moment, but fortunately the other issues–bugs, server issues, and so on–have started to clear up as of late, and things are looking up for ArenaNet’s free-to-play MMO.