Account Security

We all know there are people out there ready to scam and/or hack you, for whatever reasons.

It sucks to come home from a day at work or a social outing and sit in front of that screen looking at a naked character (which, might not be so bad depending on how hot your character is?)

What are some ways you dodge the evil bullet of getting hacked? I'm starting this thread so that the ones we play with in TOR may not suffer that fate, and/or we can maybe voice any concerns we have to Bioware.

Ways to help prevent your account from being compromised.

Have a long and strong password
Ideally, you want a very long and hard to remember password that might force you to right it down. The more complicated the better, using capitol letters, numbers, and if available special characters. I've got a password on my computer for a work program that is 32 letters long, it'd be longer but the program only recognizes that length.

Do not share your password with ANYONE
Just don't do this. I don't care if they know you, do not do this ever. The less people know your password the more secure it is, seeing as the person you give it to may not have a clean or secure computer/connection. If the company of the game you're playing asks for your PW, report them. You don't have to provide that kind of information to anyone.

Keep up to date and strong anti-virus/spyware/malware programs, and run them often.
There's many free programs (and paid,) that you should use liberally to keep your computer safe from key loggers and the like (which make the previous steps invalid...) I have AVG, and Malwarebytes, I use these every morning to scan my system.

Account Security from the Game Developer
A good example of this is Blizzard's Authenticator. Brilliant little tool that helps a bunch in addition to all the other security layers you can use. Keep yourself informed of the latest security items that the developers offer, the more you know will help you protect your account and keep you playing to your hearts content.

These are all things you should do, and should do ALL of them in conjunction with each other. I'm very certain I'm missing many things (and could write more that most non network admins probably wouldn't grasp,) so any additions, please feel free to share.

What do you want to see Bioware do to help us achieve this?

People could also use a password generator too, as opposed to pick random word(s) with numbers out of their mind. Keepass, a tool to keep track of passwords, have a password generator. It also can be used to copy paste the passwords (doesn't work everywhere), this protects against keyloggers. It also erase the clipboard after a specified time, so hackers can't get the password from the memory either (hopefully). Although keeping the system clean, is always the better way.

I changed almost all my password to generated ones, to the highest length I could by website/app. Bonus: I can't tell people my passwords, because I don't know them. Unfortunately, sometimes you get apps that don't support the copy paste and you need to types them...

Also, don't share your username!!!! It's half the security you have. That's why I hate places that use email address for the username.

As for BioWare, I think they can improve over the SWTOR website:

• Separating the "forum" ID and the login username is good.
  
• Using email as login username isn't good.
  
• Also they don't show their password policies or errors. Unless they modified that since I raised the issue in the feedback forum. I had trouble setting up a new password, no error message, but the new one didn't work. Reasons: too long.
  
• Limiting the places where we can enter the credentials and not linking to another services (aka EA account)...
  
• I don't mind the authenticator, but it doesn't protect you at 100%.
  
• Add a passphrase to the account or something similar before logging.