Recently, Gawker Network websites and accounts, including passwords, were compromised. Popular websites such as Kotaku, Gizmodo, and Lifehacker are a part of the Gawker Network, so accounts associated with those sites may have been compromised.
While this does not involve NCsoft or Lineage II, some of you could be affected if your NCsoft Master Account or Lineage II Game Account information is the same as your login information for any of those sites. As such, it is never bad advice to change your account passwords frequently, and never use the same passwords that you use on other sites.
As someone working in IT I can asure you no password is safe. Change it often, write it down and attach it to the PC if you play on same computer always or put in your phone if you change computers often like me. It wont matter then how complicated it is.
Also, never use same password on other sites as Sace said. If you have trouble remembering, use same password but change a letter or add, for instance, lets say at L2 I have password Gigi123 and I am terrible at remembering passwords, but i can remember a simple thing like adding an F for Facebook, for instance, or changing the first letter to an F, such as Gigi123F or Figi123. While this is less secure than having a totally different password like AbC0yT89 for one and Mj8YiBwr for another, it is still a vast improvement over having the same password in both places. If you have this rule always, it will be easy to remember a password and still be different in many places you go to.
Also 3rd party client makers may go out of business because of increasing competition and dwindling number of players and their password database might go out for sale. Or could be hacked into due to poor security, whatever, so take the necessary precautions.
Never click links in your email, even if you are 100% sure that is from a trusted source. Copy and paste it in your browser if you have to go there, or even better, go to the site and look for what you were notified in the email about. One golden rule to remember is that no serious company will send you a link which asks you for username and password as soon as you click it, even if that page looks exactly like the original. The safe bet is to ALWAYS go to the site directly and look up the info there instead of clicking links in email.
Keep your operating system updated, especially since we deal here with windows. If you have licence for it use Microsoft's security essentials, otherwise avira or avast! are even better, but sometimes the latter may intrude on you and there have been known issues with Gameguard rootkit, so, for l2 Avira is better. However, keep in mind that specially written trojans designed to steal l2 passwords are unlikely to be caught fast, due to their low circulation, therefore dont asume something is safe only because you have up to date antivirus, especially when it comes from l2 sites, moreover, sites that are known to promote cheating.
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