77,000 Steam Accounts Hijacked Every Month - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 10 December 2015 / 4,807 Views
Valve has been doing what it can to prevent people from having their Steam accounts stolen, however since the introduction of Steam Trading the problem has increased twenty-fold, according to a new post on Steam from Valve.
Items from the stolen accounts would then be traded again and again until it was traded to an innocent user. Valve has decided to allow innocent users to keep these stolen items, however this then causes there to be a duplicate item in circulation when Valve 'return' the item to the original owner.
Valve has revealed that around 77,000 accounts are stolen every month from an organized network of hackers. Users that have their accounts hijacked include professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players, Reddit contributors, and more.
"We've worked to improve account security features, closed loopholes, improved how and when we message users that their account is at risk, added self-locking, and created the Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator," said Valve.
"Two-factor authorization is the use of a separate device to confirm your identity. The security of this system is based on moving that step from your PC to a device a hacker can't access, such as your smartphone. PCs can be easily compromised, therefore a PC-based authenticator would not provide better security than a password or email authentication. "
"We needed to create our own two-factor authenticator because we need to show users the contents of the trade on a separate device and have them confirm it there. Requiring users to take a code from a generic authenticator and enter it into a hijacked PC to confirm a trade meant that hackers could trick them into trading away items they didn't intend to. This basically made it impossible to use a generic third party authenticator, such as Google Authenticator, to confirm trades."
_______________________________________________________________________________________
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
More Articles
They could just stop steam trading for a while, until they sorted it out...but...that would lose money.
Obviously the cost of 77k hijacked accounts a month is less than the amount they make off steam trading.
That is correct! Gabe is so skinny, he clearly needs all the $$ he can get to defeat hunger...
Praise Gaben! Eat for us until the fridge is merely a small speck rolled into your Katamari like bloated glory.
Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator is not good, the keychain authenticator device is much better perhaps. But whatever i've never bought any games from Steam for a while, i only have 130 games so far, however real library is less than 80 games without counting old school games, free to play, beta & Half-Life 1/2 mod games.
And people complained about the PS and Xbox account hacking in the past. Looks like "The Master Race" is even worse.
