Hijacked Steam Account - Important

[Sharpshoote]

Just recently my Steam account was hijacked, I finally after 5 days got Steam to reinstate my account with proof of my Paypal payment for my original purchase of the Pre-Ordered version of TF2. I have been a computer buff for 25 years now and I practice just about every form of security there is as well as impossible to figure out passwords so there is no advice that I could possibly give to prevent such a thing to happen to any of you but just the simple advice of be carefull and aware that this is going on out there. The final outcome was, they stopped the moron that hijacked it from using it anymore and I did not have to purhase another Orange Box but I did lose ALL my stats (I had great stats) and I lost ALL the people in my Friends List. If this happens to you, it will be very obvious, you will attempt to log in to play and it will say that Steam does not recognize your password. All you can do from there is to go directly to the Steam website and fill out the form to report a Hijacked account.

 

[Eire.32]

wow i'm so sorry for you man,
Eire.32

 

[Blindsfell]

yea my old account - assasin00 (feel free to add him and cuss him out for me) got hacked. it sucked becuz i had to buy all the games over agian

 

[Wal-Mart Security]

Ah, that sucks man, glad you got it back though. One good thing about actually buying game disks is that if you account if hijacked, you give proof you bought the game on disk, and they give you your account back, I have Half-Life 2, CSS, and DoDs on disk, so I can get my account back if I needed to, you only need one game on disk to do it, but I just so happen to have bought these 3 games on disk All the rest of my games are downloaded.

 

[ned]

Sorry to hear that. Any word on how the account was hijacked?

 

[Italian_Stallion-TR-]

That makes me want to go out and buy games on disc, seems a lot easier to recover if that happens.

 

[Sharpshoote]

Yeah, get ready, it was just done to me again. I have no idea what is going on, I just reformatted my system and have every possible firewall,spyware & antivirus on this bad boy so I think it has something to do with Steams end, I am awaiting a new Steam account now and I am seriously considering running up to the store and just buying the Orange Box so that I will have it on disc. I have had Steam since day one when Won made its exit and never had any problem before of any kind until I Preordered TF2, so I know it has to be a screw up on their side. Hopefully this will be the end of it.

 

[RaiN]

Is your password easy to tell? like johnsmith or 12345. I know the examples are an exageration. I found passwords like Ds%$1Dd3&L seem to have kept me fairly safe over the years. Again the example was an exageration, but just find a word and make it "L33t!" and works well. Military forced me into leet speak password with their atleast 3 upper, 3 lower, 3 number and 3 symbols in the government login passwords.

 

[hybrid [JONES]]

That blows man, two times in a row! I would be pissed! Try changing the email and all of the info from the old one.

 

[Crash 303]

Wow that does suck.
I'm gunna back-up all my files now, and reinforce my security.
LOL

 

[hybrid [JONES]]

when in the steam menu and it says would you like to back your games up. what does it do?

 

[xRomanticDeathx]

humm i don't know, someone should look that up, i want to know too

 

[Sharpshoote]

Yeah, I changed all info including email addy and password was assigned from Steam (very long numeric & alpha code that had no meaning and impossible to guess).

 

[Food_Fight!]

Wow, that would be annoying. Sorry man.

 

[Sharpshoote]

I gave up on counting on Steams preordered version of Orange Box so I just purchased the Retail version from the store. Now to start from scratch with all my stats, friends list..etc etc....Blah. Great scrim last night, see yall at the next one.

 

[Volcom]

dude that must really suck......... it happened to me once this guy was asking me to give him my account info in chat his name was like Steam somthing and i was like hell no dude... and then he was like a scammer and we got into an arguement... but just change email and do the thing that death told you to do it will work ... i would never guess that kind of password??

 

[JMaster299]

Yeah, I've been attacked a couple of times but my Nortons Firewall blocked it. I would be playing CS:CZ or CS:Source and the game would minimize and I would get an Warning saying HL2.exe was trying to access my system through the internet. Now any time a program connects to the internet the first time Nortons will let me know and I tell it it's ok and it lets it through after that. So, anytime I saw this come up after the first time I knew it wasn't legit and I disable all access to my internet ran my virus and spyware sweep and restarted the computer. People hack servers and get Steam ID's and user IP's and try to attack them. I have seen people do some real damage to servers making it impossible to play until the owner can get the server company to shut down the server and assign them a new one. People really suck sometimes.