Steam Guard Now in Beta

[Matt-aka-FAST]

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.”

For more information about Steam Guard and Intel® Identity Protection Technology visit Steam Support's knowledge base.

 

[shockwave]

Considering my profession if this ever gets out to any of my past or potential future clients I will never live it down but a few years ago in a moment of lapsed judgment I responded to an email that supposedly came from Steam Support and ended up getting my account hijacked. Now before anyone says smooth move moron, I knew damn well that Steam never sent emails requesting user account information but as I said before it was a moment of lapsed judgment, I was distracted and just didn't think about what I was doing. Not 3 seconds after replying it hit me what I had just did and I immediately contacted Steam Support and was able to get my account restored within hours. Yes it happen that fast as soon as I realized what I had done, I tried to log in to my Steam Account to change my password but it had already been hijacked.


The lesson in that embarrassing story is that this can happen to anyone if it can happen to me. I am sure they have more than just this one method to hijack your account, so my advice to anyone with a Steam Account is you should probably take advantage of this new feature to help protect your account, player reputation and the games you paid for. That being said I will definitely be installing this future.

* On a side note does TBG have a Steam Community and if so how can I join it?

 

[Matt-aka-FAST]

yea still active Steam Community :: Group :: True Born Gaming

 

[shockwave]

yea still active Steam Community :: Group :: True Born Gaming

Thanks Mr. FAST.

 

[Frit0z]

this is pretty cool im sure it will cut down those annoying phishing pms i get on steam.