Message of the day: Consider changing your password?

So I log on today and there's a dev/community message advising players to change their passwords. So did something happen that I'm not aware of? Did the NCsoft servers get hacked or something? Just wondering as to what caused this message to pop out of the blue.

I would imagine it's related to that other game getting a huge amount of information stolen.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Ah that explains it. Well seeing as I haven't played that game in a very long while I think I'm safe. Plus I don't remember what the password could be. Then again better safe than sorry I guess I'll make the rounds later tomorrow and change my passwords.

Think Zwillinger got skunked on Virtue Wednesday, he had to log in to tell us not to trust anyone saying they were an NCName and so on. Unsure if someone posed as him but it was kinda scary.

Many people use the same username/password combo on all of their games and even non-game activities for convenience. When a password breach occurs at a game company in that case, you need to change your password everywhere, not just at the game that was immediately affected, unless you happen to have a good enough memory that you don't duplicate usernames and/or passwords around the internet.

I've had the fun experience of having a game company suffer a break-in and then two weeks later, my email account is suddenly being used as a spam relay because it had the same username and password as the compromised game account.