For those of you feeling like you need a better understanding of how Steem keys (ie Passwords) work, you should check out this post by @dragosroua
The threats made by the hackers to have claimed 7000 passwords should not scare you either. They don't need to try and attack Steemit.com to gather passwords when the Steem blockchain itself is public knowledge.
Anyone can attempt attacks on the blockchain to uncover private keys, that's why your keys are a crazy long number that you don't get to pick on your own.
They're that long and inmemorable so that they are extremely hard to crack. We're talking millenia at this point in our technological state to just crack one. So the claim that they've now compromised 7000 accounts as part of the recent ddos attacks is laughable.
The only way that any hacker is going to get access to your account is if you actually give them your key. That's why it is so important to make absolutely sure you know what site you are on whenever you are using your active or owner key.
Wow! Great info here. Thank you. I am still learning so much every day thanks to people like yourself 🙏🏻
Happy to help my friend. I was so glad to see that you were able to get your account back. Also very glad to see you kept your Steem powered up. That's definitely another huge boon for the Steem blockchain that makes it stand out against the others. It's a killer feature to be able to protect your assets from being instantly withdrawn in cases just like this.
PS- I'm still looking forward to the video where you show us how to make a spinning staff like yours and some initial steps to get spinning in the right direction :)
If anyone's interested, I did a follow up post that gives a better picture on the kind of time frame we're talking to actually try to hack your private key. How Long Would it Take to Hack Your Steem Password
Thanks for sharing the other post. It was appropriate and very helpful! I posted a long reply over there too to further dig into this key issue and how best to share account security tips with new people.
Definitely, he did a great job with that post and the more people that see it the better. It really is one of the trickier things for new folks to understand especially when this is usually their first interaction with any kind of blockchain.