Steam's hijacked account response time.

Soldato
Joined
26 Dec 2005
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I stupidly tried to download a pc engine emulator off the newsgroups that i thought might be a bit dodgy, i virus scanned it, and it seemed okay, but it wasnt what i thought, so i binned it. Anyway, within a minute, my steam account had been hijacked and a password request had been made to be changed.

Very frustrating, but they take so long to respond and fix it, i had only just set up a new one after having my last account hijacked and forgetting my secret password (user error I know), its been lost in the mire with about 10 games on it as steam wont respond and i cant find a telephone number for them to try and iron out the problems.

Why is steam so easy for hackers to pinch your stuff though? I know its my fault for downloading a program without knowing what it was, but there must be some basic errors in how steam stores passwords to allow them to pinch them so easily.
 
Not long, as i remember the account will get fully disabled first and they will ask for proof of ownership I seem to recall having to photocopy my Halflife 2 manual with my cd key. Whole thing took a couple of days but you are far from out of the woods even when you get it back.

The problem is if the account has been used for cheating and then got flagged by Steam's Vac, it doesn't ban you right away so you may have to wait a few weeks before you can say the account is clean.
If it does get banned you cannot play online with any of your games you bought over Steam that have the Vac anti cheat system in. No if's no buts .... you are screwed so if you want to play say TF2 online you have to buy it again along with any others you may have.

I still to this day don't know how my password fell into the wrong hands, i have hardware and software firewalls anti-virus, anti-malware e.t.c and yet they still managed to steal it.
Only thing i do different now is i checked the box "Don't save account credentials on this computer" so i have to type the password in each time i connect to Steam.
 
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Check out a program called Identity Finder, it will scan your comp for any passwords, cc numbers that are wide open and give you chance to take care of it before the worst happens.
There is a free version on their site and you will probably be very surprised and what it picks up and is ripe for the taking.
 
i had an email last week saying that i had requested a password change and i hadnt, so i changed the password to something a bit harder. worried me a bit mind...
 
Not long, as i remember the account will get fully disabled first and they will ask for proof of ownership I seem to recall having to photocopy my Halflife 2 manual with my cd key. Whole thing took a couple of days but you are far from out of the woods even when you get it back.

The problem is if the account has been used for cheating and then got flagged by Steam's Vac, it doesn't ban you right away so you may have to wait a few weeks before you can say the account is clean.
If it does get banned you cannot play online with any of your games you bought over Steam that have the Vac anti cheat system in. No if's no buts .... you are screwed so if you want to play say TF2 online you have to buy it again along with any others you may have.

I still to this day don't know how my password fell into the wrong hands, i have hardware and software firewalls anti-virus, anti-malware e.t.c and yet they still managed to steal it.
Only thing i do different now is i checked the box "Don't save account credentials on this computer" so i have to type the password in each time i connect to Steam.

Theres nothing like that to worry about on my second account, i only had that indie pack on it that i bought at the weekend, nothing multiplayer.
 
i don't understand how people lose their accounts tbh..

community pages can often have 'fake logins' on them
 
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