Nobody told me that Old School RuneScape was home to a perfect time capsule of mid 2000s cybersecurity
Despite being someone who had never touched RuneScape outside of a slightly dodgy interaction in the game as a child, I somehow found myself right in the middle of RuneFest back in March. It is slightly strange infiltrating a convention for a community you've absolutely no stake in, but if Jagex's master plan was to get me to dabble in its MMO, it worked: I came home from the convention, and downloaded Old School RuneScape on my phone and PC.
This was a move that greatly pleased both my partner and a friend of mine who outed himself as a RuneScape enjoyer. One of the first things both of them said to me was that, if I wanted to farm my combat levels, the Stronghold of Security was the hip and happening place to be.
I'd been dancing around the idea of jumping into the hole slap-bang in the middle of the Barbarian Village, but 'Stronghold of Security' conjures up terrifying imagery of fiery fortresses littered with traps, barricades, and deadly enemies waiting for me to step one foot out of line so they can ambush me.
As soon as my partner told me there were rainbow booties waiting in the depths—in the ominous Sepulchre of Death—though, I immediately requested to be chaperoned down for my rewards. And hey, to be fair my assumptions of it being a dangerous bunker were mostly true, at least for my pitifully levelled adventurer.
But something I had completely failed to prepare for was the fact that half of the challenge would come from being diligently questioned about my cybersecurity prowess, and suddenly I felt eight-years-old in the mid-2000s all over again.
Password protected
Because sure, while the Stronghold of Security is a heavily gated vault, I don't need feats of strength to brute force my way past skeleton guards or looming sentinels. Turns out, I just need a little bit of internet know-how.
Who can I give my password to? Is it okay to buy a RuneScape account? Can I lend my account to a friend who can do a tough quest for me? These are the thought-provoking riddles I'm required to answer to traverse through the stronghold's gated maze, and going through it made me weirdly giddy about the whole thing.
It's funny in a way, because these are still the sort of questions being asked today. Anyone in a corporate job has probably had to sit through an hour or two of phishing awareness that isn't too far off what I'm going through in the Stronghold of Security. Maybe HR departments need to start chucking a bunch of mobs to kill between training modules, as a little treat.
Even still, it feels like a perfect time capsule of 2000s internet culture. A time where the horrors of the world wide web weren't entirely apparent, where tons of kids (like me) were given unrestricted access to spaces we shouldn't have even known about. A time where passwords didn't even need a number in them! And we all most certainly used our real-life name or literally the word "password" at least once.
Online accounts weren't exactly as closely tied to our entire lives as they are now, but they were still ripe for hackers and ne'er-do-wells to come along, pretend to be your friend, trick you into handing your account over, and then rinsing it of all valuable assets. And hell, people like me who grew up alongside these games were, you know, literal children. We had absolutely zero sense of cybersecurity. At least I didn't anyway. It's a wonder I never got hacked, quite frankly.
But that's why I think Stronghold of Security is actually pretty rad. It feels like such a unique way to push awareness around keeping yourself and your accounts safe out in the scary online world, and tying it to an easily-accessible spot with great combat farming opportunities and shiny rewards means it's nigh-unavoidable for anyone dedicating more than a few hours to RuneScape.
Ultimately, for all its whimsy, its core intention seemed to work. In 2020, former Jagex developer Mod Maz highlighted creating the Stronghold of Security as one of her defining moments on Twitter, adding that "hijacking and security tickets dropped by 80%" That's an impressive number, one which makes this bespoke idea even cooler in my eyes.
I'm almost sad that the gated questions are a one-and-done situation, because they're so endearing and, crucially, still relevant. I wouldn't be mad at having to retake my silly videogame security quiz every few years. Hell, I'd be even less mad if other games found whimsical ways to work in account safety like this. It's a win-win situation for everyone: Developers have fewer hacking-related headaches to deal with, and players get to learn that they definitely shouldn't give their password to 46-year-old Barry masquerading as a 12-year-old.