We urge everyone in the Minecraft community to change their Minecraft.net passwords ASAP. Please read below for tips on how to create a better password before doing so.
It recently came to our attention that a list of approximately 1,000 Minecraft account names and passwords were made freely available on the internet. We believe this list consists of information collected by a group of malicious users from a well known "griefing team". How the information in this list was obtained is not sure, but we suspect they collected them through the use of hacked clients (that pretend to only give you extra features like flying or seeing through blocks but actually send your account information to the creators as well) or websites made to look like the official Minecraft site.
Given this information, we feel we need to stress that people make sure to only use Minecraft client mods that they absolutely trust and are verified by the community. While this issue brings to the light the malicious opportunities client modders have, we want to stress that many client mods found within the community are not malicious. We believe people should be healthily skeptic but not overly paranoid as to whether or not a client mod is stealing your information. Unless you're using a sketchy client that allows you to cheat, for example, you should be safe.
The first thing we did when we acquired this information was to inform Mojang of this crisis, however, we feel we can do a bit more for the community while we wait for them to handle the situation properly as we've learned that there's a high possibility that the griefing team is aware that their list has been made public. As such, we are going to be pre-emptively banning compromised accounts with an informative reason. Unfortunately, MCBans did not have a means of merely informing compromised accounts that their username and password have been discovered, so banning them with a brief message telling them so is the only option.
If there is ONE thing you read in this announcement, it should be this: we urge everyone to go and change their passwords NOW, keeping in mind the following tips on creating better passwords:
* Passwords should not contain words found in the dictionary
* Passwords should contain a mixture of upper and lowercase characters.
* Passwords should contain a mixture of letters and numbers.
* Passwords should contain punctuation characters and symbols such as: % & + - = #.
* Choose a password you can remember but don't make it too easy.
* Passwords should be at LEAST 8 characters in length, but 14 or more is preferable.
* You should NOT be using the same password everywhere.
Please help us by sharing this information with everyone you know and getting them to change their Minecraft.net passwords.
