Account Hacking: It’s bad for you! Jun06

Account Hacking: It’s bad for you!

Having your gaming account hacked sucks. There’s no denying it. You’ve elected to spend your free time as well as your hard-earned cash on a game, only to have it plucked away from you is the complete opposite of what you are trying to accomplish by playing the game in the first place. Even if you manage to get the account back, the paranoia will always be there. I for one know this all too well. A few weeks after the launch of Diablo 3 in 2012, account thieves swept the game (conveniently after long enough for me to reach the max level on my main character at the time ). I was one of many, many victims of these thefts and although I hadn’t played Diablo 3 in a few weeks, the theft of my account ensured that I wouldn’t be coming back for a very long time. Full disclosure: I did not have an authenticator on my account at the time. I figured my password (12 characters, upper and lower case with numbers) was secure enough to not need it and I consider myself a technically savvy enough person to not have keyloggers and the like installed on my system. For those of you who aren’t yet in the know: An “authenticator” is Blizzard’s second factor in their two-factor security approach. When you log into the game, you enter you username and password as usual, followed by entering a constantly-changing code generated by your authenticator. This can be its own standalone $10-ish device, or a free app on your smartphone (which becomes problematic if you’re like me and enjoy trying new ROMs on your Android device on a regular basis as the app generates its own unique ID and ties it to...