WARNING: Your Steemit Password is at Risk!

profitgenerator (68)in #steemit • 8 years ago (edited)

I have just found out this yesterday that all our Steemit passwords are at risk after reading @steemitblog (the official Steemit blog) and others that raised up this issue, and many other posters that raised up this issue.

Your password probably looks like this
Pxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx , where the x-es are random characters

And you probably use this password, called master password, or master owner key, for login. So everytime you login to Steemit you use the this password to login.

This is wrong, this is not how you should login to Steemit, and I have just found this out yesterday. The master password has total control over your account, so if some hacker gets hold of this, he can steal all your coins out of your account. Therefore the master password should always be kept offline, in cold storage, securely.

Instead you should only use the posting key to login, because that way, if the posting key gets stolen, the hacker can still not steal the money out of your wallet. So it decreases the risk of theft considerably, and you can always change the posting key with your master key if it gets stolen.

The posting key will only allow you to post, when logged in, and it will only login with your master password when you want to use your wallet, so most of the time when you only login to post, you should only login with the posting key!

Go to your Wallet and Permissions and make sure nobody is looking from behind:

What you see there is the public keys (starting with 'S'), so click on Show priv key:

And what you will see now will be your login password. Use this to login when you only want to post, and use the master password when you want to move money.

Also for safety precautions, you should also change your master password now (since you've used it all this time to login and exposed it to unnecessary risk), by going to Wallet and Password, make sure you have your current password backed up, and the new password too!

WARNING: DON'T LOSE THE PASSWORD, HAVE IT BACKED UP! FAILURE TO DO SO WILL LOCK YOU OUT OF YOUR ACCOUNT!

And now after the password was changed login once more with your master password, grab your new Posting Key and from now on only login with that for writing articles.

Stay safe, have your password backed up, in secure location, don't share it with anyone, and don't post it anywhere online. Keep it offline, in a safe place. Good luck!

I've learned about this yesterday, and changed my password since and now only using the posting key to login, and I've did this mistake as many of you are doing right now, so I hope I have warned people in time before somebody loses money.