Online Account Hacking?

[VideoGameCritic]

Had dinner with some friends the other night and one lady said her son was upset because his Xbox account got hacked by somebody in Iran. She was asking me what this meant but I didn't really know. I suppose it means you lose your gamer points and access to the games you purchased?

Is this a common thing? Chalk another one up to physical media I guess. Kind of scary to think your entire online collection hangs on one password.

[Breaker]

I've heard of it, but I assumed it was mostly for credit card information, or personal identification like birth date or email address, etc. Never really thought about it causing you to lose your games. That would suck, too.

[DaHeckIzDat]

This happened to me just a couple weeks ago. I woke up to half a dozen emails from Sony saying someone had logged into my Playstation account from India, changed my password, and then changed the freaking email address you log in with. So I was completely locked out of my own account. Luckily I got in contact with Sony customer support and they reset everything before the hacker could start spending my money.

[Retro STrife]

For our sake, let's just hope he was careless with his password and entered it on phishing site, or had it super easy to guess, or something like that.

However, there was a huge hack of Sony like 10 years ago, that resulted in a ton of credit card #'s getting stolen from PSN users. Personally, I never enter my credit card info on any of my consoles. Instead, I buy digital codes on Amazon and then enter the codes on my PS4 to add funds. Let's say I see an indie game on PS4 for $20 that I've been wanting. Within 60 seconds, I can use my iPhone to buy a $20 code on Amazon, enter it on my PS4, and buy the game.

[ActRaiser]

I once had my password stolen from some random website. However, I was an idiot and used a similar password naming convention everywhere else. I got an email from Best Buy saying my new iPad and PC were available for pick-up in New York City. Of course, I don't live in New York City.

Needless, to say I changed passwords on everything after that.

[Gleebergloben123]

That’s why it is imperative to use a complex password like password1234.

[Robotrek]

90% of the time, this occurs from a data dump somewhere that people get ahold of. I got an email with my old password as the subject, and they claimed to have hacked me on an "adult" website and that they would send videos of me "enjoying myself" to everybody I know. It was all nonsense, of course. The email had a different password than the one they sent. However, it did result in my Minecraft account being compromised, as it was the only thing I can think of that had the password and email match. Since then, I've moved to using different passwords for everything and keeping the passwords on an old retro Windows-XP PC I keep offline right next to my modern PC.

[C64_Critic]

This is a big fear of mine; I've had my Steam account for well over a decade now, and have amassed quite a large collection of games. Although I rarely pay more than $5 for any one game, the overall value of my account at this point is probably close to $2500. If someone were to guess or hack my password and lock me out, I'd be forever out of all that money and those games and have to start over. I'm smart enough to have a unique and impossible-to-guess password for my account of course, but it does happen. My son has had his Steam account hacked/stolen on multiple occasions in the past, and while I suspect he's just been conned by a smooth social engineer into giving up his password each time (he swears this isn't the case, but I can't figure out how else it may keep happening), either way it results in a total loss of your library. And Steam makes it notoriously impossible to actually get a hold of anyone at the company in order to get your account back should this happen.

[bluenote]

This may be a stupid question, but does the complexity of a password really matter? Aren't hackers actually stealing the password, (based on you inputting the password in whatever device you're using), rather than trying to guess it?

[Retro STrife]

This may be a stupid question, but does the complexity of a password really matter? Aren't hackers actually stealing the password, (based on you inputting the password in whatever device you're using), rather than trying to guess it?

I think the same as you, although admittedly my knowledge in the area is very limited. I think technically someone could create a bot program that, if they know your username, could guess millions of password combos to try to guess the password. That might have worked in the old days, but I don't think it's realistic anymore, with sites requiring more complex passwords and limiting your log-in attempts.

Nowadays, I think most passwords are obtained either through massive hacks of websites (obtaining the usernames and passwords of tons of users) or individually tricking you into giving up your password (such as entering it on fake webpage that looks like the real thing, or getting you to download a virus program that reports your data back to them).