Guild Wars 2 hacking woes

While Guild Wars 2 might have been selling extremely well, with players knocking up impressive levelling sprints, it's not without its problems. A few days ago we noted the issue with mispriced items, but now ArenaNet is having to deal with hackers.

In quite an ingenious scheme, a few nefarious individuals have been attempting to find out the login information of Guild Wars players, using tools designed to help users during account setup and management. Initially, the hackers changed the email addresses on their accounts several thousand times, using a list of known email addresses from previous hacks of websites like Facebook and other games. Each time they were informed by GW2 that their email address was already in use, they were able to attempt a login using said email address and any passwords found on accounts from the same user elsewhere.

To counter this, ArenaNet has restricted the number of times a user's email can be changed and has recommended everyone use a unique password for Guild Wars 2; a strong one. That's going to be quite difficult to do though – if you haven't done so already – since ArenaNet has also disabled password resets, without much of an explanation. Presumably it's to make accounts more secure, or to stop hackers from changing a password if they take over an account, but it also makes it impossible to further secure your own account, leaving Guild Wars 2 players somewhat on their own.

KitGuru Says: Players that were previously banned for using the karma weapon exploit, should have ended the 72 hour period of suspension yesterday. Hopefully you've all given back your ill gotten gains? ArenaNet still plans to permaban those that don't.

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