Getting your account hacked, potentially losing access to it and/or getting banned from servers because the hacker is having a field day with your username is something that I have seen happen time and time again when Serenity USA was still in it's prime.
For the person who got his account hacked, he/she has to prove they weren't hacking, calm other players who will from now on be suspicious whenever something happens that doesn't make sense, and try and reclaim the account with purchase receipts if the recovery email & password was changed away from them. Not fun…
- Guessing bots cracking a weak, or commonly used password.
- A dodgy minecraft mod. To avoid these I only get my mods from the http://minecraftforum.net/ forums.If there is something wrong with the mod, it will not take long for a commenter to post a warning.
- Hacking clients. All the ones I've investigated have phoned data home to their creator.
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Migrate your account(s) to Mojang.com here if you haven't already (New accounts created after Nov 2012 already have a Mojang account): https://account.mojang.com/migrate
This will change the way you login, it was username+password. After the migration it will be email+password. This means that baddies will have to guess both your password and your email which isn't publicly visible to get access to your account. Once migrated to Mojang, email changes will also prompt an email to your old email asking if you are the person who changed the email.
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Make sure you have a valid email tied to your account.
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Use a password over 6 characters with some numbers. Something like,
il9ve9ctcf9revaris a good password that machines have a hard time guessing and you have no trouble remembering. Check your strength here: http://howsecureismypassword.net/ -
Don't ever reuse passwords, have a unique password for each place you login.
2012-12-31 Updated post with a link from Plastix
By McYukon