Steam Chief Gabe Newell believes in the security of the gaming platform. To prove this, he published the credentials for his Steam account in 2011. Since then, he has been waiting to be hacked.
To use the gaming platform Steam, you need an account. This account can become very valuable with a growing number of purchased games.
All the more important is it to protect your library from hackers and account thieves. For this purpose, Steam operator Valve offers several options as protection.
Steam boss Gabe Newell is very convinced of these protective mechanisms and wanted to prove how secure they are. For this reason, he revealed the credentials for his Steam account.
Gabe Newell revealed his Steam account data
What did Gabe Newell do? During an Intel event at CeBIT in 2011, the head of Steam took the stage. In front of the audience present, he entered the credentials for his Steam account on a computer.
The screen content was displayed on a large screen, so everyone could clearly see his username. Additionally, he revealed the typed password and urged the audience to hack his account and steal it from him.
Newell’s password is not particularly long or complex. Here you can find even worse passwords – hopefully yours is not among them.
Why did he do that? The disclosure of his credentials was a planned action by Gabe Newell. With the knowledge of his username and password, he wanted to demonstrate how secure Steam accounts are protected against theft.
Newell used this moment to present the new security system Steam Guard. In this way, the audience members were not able to log into his Steam account, change the password, and thus take over the account.
Why was his account secure? This new layer of security added a 2-step authentication when logging into Steam. Provided Steam Guard is activated, a prompt to enter an access code appears when attempting to log in on an unknown computer.
This access code is sent to the email address registered with Steam. Without this code, you cannot log into a device that you have not previously used for Steam. As long as access to the email address is secure, a Steam account remains protected from attacks.
Has his account been hacked since then? Since the disclosure of the login data, it has not been reported that the Steam chief’s account has been stolen. Since he did not have to worry about his account, Gabe Newell also had time to appear in a commercial for a kitchen device.
Since his username [email protected] is also his company email address, it seems that no one has managed to hack his email inbox so far.
Presumably, Gabe Newell was clever enough not to use his Steam password “MoolyFTW” for his email address as well.
How secure is Steam today? In recent years, Valve has not been idle and has further improved Steam Guard and added new options for more security. With the Steam app, players have another way to protect their accounts from unauthorized access.
Within the app, account owners can use Steam Guard as an authenticator and log in on a new computer, for example, by scanning a QR code. The receipt of an access code can now also optionally take place through the app instead of via email.
Public appearances by Valve boss Gabe Newell always have something special about them. A Steam user did not meet Newell personally but was even more delighted when he replied to an email from him: player waits days for Steam support, writes directly to Gabe Newell, promptly receives help
