1000s of Minecraft Account Passwords Stolen! Protect your passwords now!

It's been reported that up to 1000 Minecraft account names and passwords have been stolen and consequently published on the internet. All Minecraft players are strongly urged to change their passwords immediately.

The actual reasons behind the stolen accounts is still not clear but there are hints that pirate version of Minecraft have been modified to include the malicious code. Others have also reported that infectious mods have been bobby trapped with information stealing code. Although this has not been officially confirmed.

Whilst the over whelming majority of Minecraft mods are community driven works of art, there are some who create mods for ulterior motives. We strongly urge players to only download and use well known mods and NOT to use cheat mods that let you see through blocks or fly.

In the meantime, the guys over at mcban.com have issued bands on all of the stolen accounts. If you see the message informing you that your account was stolen, you should get in touch with them.

Mojang and in particular Notch, have been informed of the news and are working on ways to safe guard the Minecraft code against this kind of attack. Unfortunately, the openness of Minecraft and the fact that it is an indie game means that if you add security you sometimes compromise community development. It's a shame but with the popularity of Minecraft it could be heading this way.

What's a good Minecraft password?

Of course we're not going to give any specific suggestions here, but we can easily give you tips on how to make a strong password. In the technical world, passwords are easily hackable if they contain words from dictionaries or common names. Passwords which contain a set of both numbers and letters are much stronger. Even better than that are passwords which contain special symbols such as #, @ or $.

A passwords strength, is the measure of effectiveness of a password in resisting guessing and brute force (trying to guess all combinations) attacks. Using a strong password lowers the risk of a security breach and someone gaining unauthorized access to your account.

5 ways to increase Minecraft password strength

Use numbers and letters
Use upper case and lower case
Use symbols such as @, # or $
Make sure you use the maximum possible length (or close to it)
Do not include your username in the password