Tell me about the rabbits

Scan a QR code like this to enable Google authenticator

On Tuesday a new ability came to New Eden. By spending some Aurum (yes, remember that stuff) you can now purchase a skill extractor. This item can be used to extract half a million skill points from your capsuleer brain which, in turn, allows you to sell them on the open market. On the other side of this transaction you have pilots who want a quick injection of skill points. They can spend hard earned ISK and purchase your half a million SP and inject it into their head as unallocated skill points. If you've ever been given a ship or fitting for an organised roam and realised you couldn't fit some of it you'll probably be thinking this is a useful new feature. However, the cost of the skill injectors was around 620 million ISK last time I looked. Whilst it's an investment in your character it still seems a whole whack to drop just to fit a module.

Of course, EVE being EVE, it occurred to me this introduces a whole new vector for upset should you be misfortunate enough for your account to be hacked. Until this week it was only your ISK and assets which were at risk. While I never had my stuff stolen in that way I imagine it would be a nightmare to log in and discover everything gone. Since the skill extractors were introduced there is now the potential to log in and discover that in addition to losing all your stuff you may also now find a drooling mess of a 5 million SP pilot who can't even fly a shuttle any more. Oh the joy to discover that. To be fair, it would cost around 40 billion ISK to extract 100 Million SP but from what I hear those rich, rich nullsec ratters are quite likely to have wallets that fat.

With this in mind it is no coincidence that on Monday I logged all my accounts into the CCP account management page and enabled two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication is becoming increasingly common all over the internet. For the longest time people have been setting terrible passwords to protect their accounts. With two-factor authentication you either receive an email or use the Google authenticator app to generate a number based on the time you are trying to log in plus a secret shared between your app and CCP. This number is used in addition to your rubbish password to log in to your account. This means there are two pieces of information a potential hacker needs to use to access your account which should significantly reduce the likelihood of getting your account hacked.

Do you want to risk logging in and finding your pilot reduced to Lennie Small levels of intellect? Do you even know enough about rabbits to answer Lennie's questions? Do you have any idea what I'm referencing? If not then get your two-factor authentication sorted today.