How Not To Get Hacked

I wrote this up for my little brothers LoL forum earlier today and would like to share it
with you all as well. Sometimes getting hacked is unpreventable, I understand that.
However here is a list of some things you can do to surely decrease your chances
of being hacked. Some are pure common sense but some people still over-look them.

Here it goes.

How Not To Get Hacked

1. This one is obvious and pure common sense! Make sure you have a trustable
anti-virus and firewall, and it's UP TO DATE. There are MANY free to use anti-virus
and firewall programs out there which are also free to update. I urge everyone to use
both their OS firewall and a third party firewall. A lot of accounts get hacked
when an unsuspecting person unknowingly infects their machine with a key-logger.
A study recently showed there are over 30k to 50k programs out there with the sole
purpose of exploiting games and their players. Kind of scary.

2. NEVER give out your account information. A lot of gold selling services and
power leveling services ask that you provide your account information. Don't fall for
it. Your gaming accounts should be treated as credit card information. People
might find this silly, however you will find out how much those accounts are worth to
you once you've been hacked, and your account gets cleaned out and/or banned.
Most hackers will run your cleaned out/exploited character into a major city and simply use it to
spam their gold selling services or other services which are against a games T.O.S.
So you get hacked and banned which can be VERY hard to reverse.

3. Here is one people look past frequently. DO NOT use the same login information
you use for your game accounts for any third party community, fan based, or third party forum
sites. Hackers love hacking these sites and pulling the User Data files. This means
they most likely just gained access to your email address, user name, and password
that you use for the site. Hackers will not waste one minute taking this information
and running it through a games login process just to see if they get a hit and its
very automated which means FAST.

4. This one is often looked over as well. Change your game account password
MONTHLY. The harder it is to pin down your password the more trouble hackers
will have. This method would actually kill off a lot of account hacking that goes on
in the MMO world. I believe the Taiwanese World Of Warcraft servers make this
manditory every time you buy in-game time. I sometimes do this weekly depending
on what I have stored on a certain account.

5. PROTECT your email accounts associated with game accounts. Most times you just
have to provide an email address to recover a password for most accounts. Remember
email accounts are the root to game accounts. Keep them safe!

6. This last one goes hand in hand with firewalls and anti-virus. Becareful visiting a
site or url a stranger in-game has passed on to you. They may use tactics such as
trying to lore you to a certain site with a promise of exciting game news etc. Most
of the time you go to these sites and they infect your machine with viruses/key-loggers.
I have seen this time and time again.

In Closing

Never underestimate a hacker! It's what they do, it's how they spend their time. Trust
me, time is something they have tons of, I know from expierence. Never forget that
ultimately it is your responsibility to protect what is yours.