PHPBB have reported increased attempts at hacking passwords on their boards recently. This applies to many popular boards, including Wordwizard.
If anybody is asked to enter a captcha, it's because somebody has tried to hack your account.
Please use secure passwords to prevent your own account from being misused.
A secure password
- is at least 6 characters long
- is not a word found in a dictionary
- is not a place name
- uses a mixture of uppercase and lowercase characters
- has at least one numeral and/or special character
There is little that the administration team can do to prevent this type of attack, although I have taken a temporary measure to reduce the possibility of success. This means that regular users will not be able to view profiles or the member list for a while. The worst damage that can be done is that the hacker can delete or vandalize posts made by the user. If your account is hacked, your password will probably be changed, as will your email address, and we will have no way of validating you, so
secure your password! The team will not respond to email or messages saying "my account has been hijacked, can you reset the email/password to xyz" unless we know your email personally. Sorry.
If you stay logged in and don't switch computers (and are not assigned a new IP address by your provider), you will not necessarily notice the issue.
If you have been asked to enter a captcha recently, please PM me so that I can assess the scale of the problem.
