Valve detects 77,000 account hijacks on Steam every month

According to Valve, about 77,000 Steam accounts are hijacked and looted every month. The perpetrators are concerned with the items that can be exchanged and sold on the game platform. Valve now requires two-factor authentication for those who want to quickly exchange items.

Since the introduction of Steam Trading, where people can trade items with each other that represent real money, the number of account hijackings on Steam has increased twentyfold, according to Valve. Hijacking accounts to get hold of the virtual items has become a real business for criminals, the company says.

Valve has been offering two-factor authentication on Steam for a long time with its Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator. This can be used to log in and to verify the exchange of items. However, most people would not use this yet, according to the service. However, Valve sees the use of the Steam Guard app as critical to reducing account hijacks and is therefore imposing a number of restrictions on people who have not set up two-factor authentication.

The restrictions only affect trading items on Steam. Those who do not use two-step authentication will now have to wait a few days for the exchange to be completed. That should give users and Valve a chance to find out if an account has been hijacked something is wrong.

In the current situation, items from hijacked accounts were quickly traded multiple times with various other accounts and eventually sold to an innocent user through the Steam Market. When this was discovered, Valve duplicated the item in order to return it to the hacked user’s account. After all, the player who bought the item had no way of knowing it had been stolen. However, this affects the value of items within the economy on Steam. This has a major impact on rare items, which are sometimes traded for hundreds or even thousands of euros, says Valve.