Keep Your Friends Close, Keep Your Password Closer

You’ve spent hours gearing them up, getting them to level cap and agonising over their hairstyles. Now, one of the major barriers that protects your shiny things from those unscrupulous individuals out there who want to be in your account, sharding your hard-earned epics, is your account password. Here are a few tips that will hopefully strengthen that barrier, and provide you with uninterrupted gaming for years to come.

Do not share your password with anyone. Ever. A Blizzard employee will NEVER ask for your account password, and it’s certainly not wise to hand it out to your friends and family members either. They may not be as careful with the information as you are, and you can’t always be sure they’re using a machine that’s free of malicious software. And remember, under no circumstances should you ever post your account details on forums, even on our official Customer and Technical Support forums.

Don’t opt for a password that’s easy to guess. There are programs out there that specialise in generating possible account passwords by using a list of common words and terms. These ‘Brute Force’ programs can be used by those trying to gain fraudulent access to WoW accounts. However, by following some simple steps, you can reduce the chances of your password being guessed:

• Size matters! Try to make your password at least eight characters long. The longer it is, the harder it will be to guess.
• Never replicate your account name in your password, even if you’ve added numbers or symbols. This just makes life easier for Brute Force programs.
• Brute Force programs will also look for repeating letter or number sequences, e.g. 123123, so avoid that.
• Do not use common words, e.g. anything you can find in a dictionary, names, places and so on.
• Common number/letter replacements, such as 8 for B, 1 for I, 3 for E and 0 for O, might seem clever but they’re well-known. Avoid this!
• Don’t use numbers and letters that are in a line on your keyboard, e.g. qwerty. Brute Force programs are well aware of these tactics.
• Use a mixture of letters, numbers and symbols (just adding numbers to the end of your password isn’t enough).
• Change your password regularly!
• Don’t use the same password for WoW as you do for other things, such as websites – particularly WoW-related ones.

If, despite your best efforts, your account is compromised or you forget your password, you can visit our password recovery page to reclaim access to your account. And if you’d like an extra level of security for your account, take a look at our Authenticators – they even come with an in-game Core Hound pet!

Find out more about account security in our previous article, ‘Help, I’ve been hacked’.

Finally, do you have any suggestions on how to protect your password? Maybe something we haven’t mentioned here, something you’ve come up with yourself or been recommended by a friend? Share your thoughts!