77,000 Steam Accounts Hijacked Every Month

10th December, 0 replies

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."

Source:

goo.gl/…

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