We have another entry on the growing list of hacks - Blizzard Entertainment, publisher of popular games such as World of Warcraft and the Diablo and Starcraft series, reported last week that a large amount of user account data for Battle.net gamers was compromised.

“This week, our security team found an unauthorized and illegal access into our internal network here at Blizzard. We quickly took steps to close off this access and began working with law enforcement and security experts to investigate what happened,” wrote Blizzard President Mike Morhaime. “We take the security of your personal information very seriously, and we are truly sorry that this has happened.”

Stolen data includes email addresses, answers to security questions, a database of “cryptographically scrambled” passwords, and data related to dial-in and smartphone app-based two-factor authentication. Battle.net users should change their account passwords immediately. You can do that here.

Jindrich Kubrec, Avast Virus Lab senior analyst gives some tips for securing your passwords:

1. Avoid anything ‘personal’ such as names and birth dates – see this list for examples of passwords to avoid
2. Avoid overly complex passwords as you don’t want to write them down
3. Don’t reuse passwords anywhere – leaks will happen in the future and you don’t want a single leak giving the bad guys keys to all the online services you use
4. Longer passwords are always better
5. Beware the phishers: always ensure you’re doing sensitive operation on the legitimate site, under a secure and verified connection. I’d also recommend never clicking on links in emails to update sensitive information Instead, manually enter the site and make changes.
6. If you can’t be bothered with steps 1 – 5, try avast! EasyPass to generate strong, unique passwords for every site you visit. The best part is that you access your passwords using one Master Password, so you don’t have to remember lots of passwords.