Around 77,000 Steam accounts are hacked every month.

This information comes from a Valve’s statistics. Valve revealed this information earlier this week. They made a blog post stating,

What used to be a handful of hackers is now a highly effective, organized network, in the business of stealing and selling items. It would be easier for them to go after the users who don’t understand how to stay secure online, but the prevalence of items make it worthwhile to target everyone. We see around 77,000 accounts hijacked and pillaged each month…It’s a losing battle to protect your items against someone who steals them for a living.

This shows that Steam being hacked is nothing new, but the amount of hackers has greatly increased. The hackers’ targets can be chosen randomly, and they can wait months for their tactics to pay off.

They’ve stated that they have improved their security and improved when users will get an alert telling them their account is at risk. As part of their security measures they are suggesting users to use the smartphone as an additional authenticator. They go on to say,

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.

So I would suggest Steam users to set up their smartphone as a Steam authenticator to further protect their account.

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