Blizzard offers security advice for Battlenet and other internet accounts.

Just about all of us have either been hacked or know someone who has been hacked. It's a familiar story and, while Blizzard is very good about restoring someone's character, it's still very annoying and inconvenient.

What is somewhat more serious is that if your WoW account was hacked, there's a decent chance you could have other compromised accounts with more vital information, such as banks or credit card companies.

Blizzard recently released a bit of advice for people when making internet accounts. In short, don't use the same password for everything, because if someone breaks one account, they've broken them all.

A good strategy for someone who wants security but doesn't want to have to remember all these different passwords is to use a base and a salt. A salt is an extra part of a password that you tag onto the end. It will be different for every account you use.

A strong password will contain letters, both upper and lowercase as well as numbers and special characters. A good way to get a strong password you'll remember is to create a sentence, use the first letter of every word, mixing up letters and numbers and upper and lowercase. The result is a strong password that is still easy to remember. It should be at least eight characters long.  You can also just use random keys; it will be harder at first to remember, but it doesn't take too long and it'll be just as easy to type as your old password.

When you have your base password, simply add a salt to it. The salt should be something that you will remember for any given site, but is not super easily guessed. Remember that you're mainly defending against bots, who can't guess salts at all, so it doesn't have to be something really arcane.

We will have a follow up to this story with more advice to assist you in securing all your internet accounts and computer!

-Xsarus