Hacked gmail/steam accounts
Posted: November 29th, 2011, 12:44 am
As some of you may know, I have a rather large collection of steam accounts for tf2 idling. I have a gmail account paired with each one of these, unimaginatively named idling1, idling2, etc. The passwords were similarly unimaginative (it was the same one for every alt gmail and team account).
On the 25th, someone got into them. Took half the gmail accounts, and the steam accounts paired with them. As you can imagine, I was rather annoyed by this. Gmail accounts are stupidly hard to get back into, and steam support is... well... steam support. The guy had changed the recovery information and even had set up two step verification on one of them.
I had one trump card. My main gmail account was fine (different password). All my alt accounts used my main as the secondary account, which meant that it got the 'welcome to gmail email' that no one reads. Well, it turns out that that email has a unique verification code associated with the new google account.
I sent those codes in with the account retrieval request. I had access to all my accounts 3 minutes later (except the one that was set up for two-step; it's just going to take a little longer, I hope). The steam accounts were still associated with the same gmail addresses, so I got them back too.
Moral of the story, make sure that you have your verification code email somewhere safe. Or, if not that, never delete any emails ever, no matter how useless they might seem. At least laugh a little at the hacker's misfortune.
On the 25th, someone got into them. Took half the gmail accounts, and the steam accounts paired with them. As you can imagine, I was rather annoyed by this. Gmail accounts are stupidly hard to get back into, and steam support is... well... steam support. The guy had changed the recovery information and even had set up two step verification on one of them.
I had one trump card. My main gmail account was fine (different password). All my alt accounts used my main as the secondary account, which meant that it got the 'welcome to gmail email' that no one reads. Well, it turns out that that email has a unique verification code associated with the new google account.
I sent those codes in with the account retrieval request. I had access to all my accounts 3 minutes later (except the one that was set up for two-step; it's just going to take a little longer, I hope). The steam accounts were still associated with the same gmail addresses, so I got them back too.
Moral of the story, make sure that you have your verification code email somewhere safe. Or, if not that, never delete any emails ever, no matter how useless they might seem. At least laugh a little at the hacker's misfortune.