Steam Guard

[Savant]

[b]

What is Steam Guard?

Steam Guard, a new Steam account security feature offering two-factor authentication, is now available in beta. As a Steam account holder, you can now take advantage of this additional level of account security, further prohibiting others from gaining access to your account.

As a beta participant, once you’ve verified your email address with Steam, Steam Guard becomes available for your use and is enabled for your Steam account by default.

With Steam Guard enabled, anyone attempting to login as you from an unrecognized computer must first provide additional, one-time authorization. A special access code will be sent to your contact email address, and this code must be entered into Steam before your first login on an unfamiliar computer is complete. You will also be notified if any login attempts from computers other than those you’ve authorized occur. Steam Guard essentially acts as a form of “User Rights Management,” where you as the user have greater control over access to your stuff.

“Account phishing and hijacking are our top support issues,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “With Steam Guard, we’ve taken a big step towards giving customers the account security they need as they purchase more and more digital goods.”

Gabe demonstrated further development of Steam Guard today at the CeBIT computing trade show in Hannover, Germany. In addition to email-based authentication, Steam Guard will soon offer other forms of secondary authentication, such as Intel® Identity Protection Technology, a hardware-based security feature available with the new 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ and Core™ vPro® processors. With IPT, secondary authentication is effortless, as it is provided by the chipset itself.

To opt into the latest Steam client beta and begin protecting your account with Steam Guard, launch the Steam client and visit Steam Settings’ Account tab, then changing your beta participation to “Steam Update.”

How to activate Steam Guard

1. Join the Beta [/B]

Steam Guard is currently only available to those who opt into the current Steam Beta, which you can do by visiting Steam Account Settings and changing your Beta participation to “Steam Beta.”

2. Be sure your contact email address is verified with Steam.

As a Beta tester, you must also verify your contact email address with Steam. You can check whether your email address is already verified by visiting Steam Account Settings. A verified address will be marked as “Verified.” To verify your email address, follow these instructions.

3. Restart Steam, three times.

Yes, that is a lot of times, but this is only a requirement during the beta.

Sauce

Gabe Newell has given out his Steam account information and double dog dares you to log-in to his account.

Youtube: Gabe Newell hands out his username / password for Steam

[King_Kaddo]

I locked his account. Close enough.

[Ramirezoid]

Go back in time, log into gabe’s account

use it

[Savant]

apparently, the only way now to gain access into his account is to steal his machine

or crack the security

[King_Kaddo]

or crack his email account

[DinoThrasher]

^^ This.

Obviously they can’t completely lock out computers that Steam hasn’t registered your account directly to, since you won’t be using the same computer forever, which is why I imagine they went with the email system.

This does, of course, mean you only need to crack his email to get immediate access to his account, and not steal his entire machine.

Granted, it does say it will notify you of all attempts on unauthorized computers, but if you hack Gabe’s email the first time and lock in with the first attempt, will it notify you of that attempt, or assume it must be the real person?

[CTID]

I’d assume it’d notify you, considering it’d email the authentication code to your email address.

Though if you get in on the first try, him being notified is a moot point, because you could just delete the email notifying him.

[OrderOfDagon]

This would have came in use 8 months ago when my account was phished. Loving the idea, wish Gabe would put that logic into Episode 3.

[sersoft]

@Savant

apparently, the only way now to gain access into his account is to steal his machine

or crack the security

Someone needs to hack gabe’s home PC and corrupt the windows machine ID so that he can never log-in to his account.

[Siggs]

GET DAT GUY WHO LEAKED HL2

[DinoThrasher]

I’m pretty sure if you do that, it will just throw up a “You’re signed into a new computer!” message, send him an email, and then authorize the new ID.

[Scrab_on_mars]

Gonna email Gabe and blackmail him into giving us his email login. BRB.

[Savant]

this is how it looks like when you login from a new computer

the email contains a confirmation code which you need to enter when loging in

[Krazor]

Gabe won’t let me friend him in community. I’m hurt, Gabe.

[russilker]

lol this won’t help anyone. The number one way accounts are stolen is thru email (giving steam the email address in the “forgot account name” box to get the username and using the email account’s password to log in), so this will be equally easy to bypass by using the email address.

[sersoft]

They have the stats, I’m sure they know exactly how accounts get hacked.

[Imonfire]

Does it work with the IP adress? Because I frequently move, like every two weeks, my computer (from my mom’s house to my dad’s house and vice-versa) and, needless to say, I get a new IP adress everytime I do this. So I don’t want my account locked every two weeks.

[CTID]

It doesn’t get locked, all you have to do is check your email and copy and paste an authentication key when you log in again.

[Surplus]

I’m glad despite Intel having been a partner in doing this I can still do this with an AMD processor.

[striker]

I think the real purpose for this “guard” is not securing accounts, but rather restricting users to using only a few machines and so eliminating account sharing. In some not so distant future, Steam will come up with news that they will restrict the possible number of usable machines to something around 2.