How I Got Pwned: A Story of Steem-Stealing Malware

SO. I bought The Surge 2 a couple months ago. Great game. Action packed. Souls-like. In a word, awesome.

I waited on the edge of my seat for the Steam download to finish. I was so stoked to play this release. But because there is no God and life is more brutal than any of us could have possibly imagined, an error came up when I clicked that lovely blue “Play” button. Something about Vulcan something or other. I searched online for a solution and found basically nothing useful, just a couple of half-baked Reddit threads with no answers. There were, however, a couple of alleged fixes on YouTube.

Long story short, I followed the instructions in one of the videos, and promptly got the most gnarly malware I’ve gotten in years (probably since before I watched my adult videos on anything besides PornHub). My computer locked up, relentlessly opening and closing programs and web browsers, sending me on a game of computer virus Whack-a-Mole that lasted a few hours. Turns out I just needed to update my video card driver, and the whole thing was entirely avoidable. yay.

Almost a week after this debacle, I logged into Steem to see how things were going around here. I wasn’t really active here at the time, just logging in once a week or so to buy or sell SteemMonsters, read a couple of pos- wait, WTF?

I didn’t transfer that 552 STEEM to @blocktrades. I made a short, frustrated post and ragequit. The transfer occurred on the day that I tried to fix my game and got pwned. I still hadn’t put together the pieces of this puzzle - that the malware had stolen my STEEM via my browser, which evidently had my password saved.

After taking that hit, I really just needed to walk away from this platform for awhile. 552 Steem isn’t all that much in the grand scheme of things, but it was enough to me feel like I had wasted a lot of time and energy.

That being said, I think it’s time for me to start posting here again. It’s good for me to be writing and presenting my creative outlets, and I’ve got some new projects in the works (new band, working in GameMaker Studio) to write about.

Don’t trust fixes for games on YouTube! Is the lesson of this post! See ya’ll soon 🔥

Photo sources:

https://wccftech.com/the-surge-2-inteview-e3-2018

https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2017/how-to-protect-against-computer-viruses.html