The other day I was going about my morning routine when I suddenly received a direct message in Discord from @cryptoandcoffee. This wasn't a surprising occurrence as he and I frequently chat back and forth, but I was surprised by the content of that days chat.
Apparently, his STEEM account had been compromised in some way (possibly because of a posting authority), and some of his liquid STEEM had been taken as well as a powerdown initiated.
What some of you may not know, is the fact that when your HIVE account was created, it used the same keys as your STEEM account. If you do not change the keys on your Hive account and someone gains access to your Steem account, they will also be able to access your Hive account.
I jumped into my Steem account to check and make sure that nothing had been compromised. I then decided it might be a good idea to finally get around to changing those Hive keys.
That's where I ran into my first issue... I use PeakD exclusively for all of my Hive stuff and I had no idea where to find the area to change my keys. Luckily because he had already been through the process, @cryptoandcoffee pointed me in the right direction.
I have shown the area in the screenshot above. Now that I know where to find it in my wallet screen, it is quite obvious (right under the "Actions" menu).
That is when I ran into my second issue... I have always felt I do a really good job of storing the keys for all of my crypto that I own. We probably all have heard the saying at least once: "not your keys, not your crypto". You can go to Reddit, Telegram, or any other social media platform and find countless stories of people begging to get their account recovered because they lost their keys.
As I said, I always felt like I did a good job at storing my keys, because I never wanted to be one of those people. Then suddenly here I was in that exact same position.
For various reasons, I have four accounts on the STEEM/HIVE blockchains. Two of them I had recorded the keys no problem, the other two I had somehow failed to get down my Owner Key.
After about half an hour of sheer panic and popping into the Hive Discord server to see if someone could help me, I quickly realized that the key I thought was my owner key (which wasn't working), was actually my Master/Backup key. With that, I was able to Reveal All Keys shown in the screen above and then I was able to get the owner key for both of my accounts.
Trust me, this time I have those keys recorded and saved in a very safe place.
With the proper information in hand, I was able to "change the password" and create all new keys for my accounts as you can see above.
After that, the hardest part was entering all of the new keys and accounts into the Hive Keychain extension. Luckily, because you can import and export I only had to do it on one machine and then the others were a piece of cake.
My next step will be to go into my Steem accounts and revoke any of the Authorities that I am no longer using. As I mentioned in the beginning, @cryptoandcoffee thinks that may be where the issue started with his accounts. It is always a good idea to review who you have trusted your keys with and whether or not that project is still active/reliable.
So there you have it, what could have been a very very bad day for me ended up not so horrible. Be sure to review your keys and make sure you have all of them (especially the owner one) in a safe place or you may have a very bad day yourself!
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Keys are so needed but what a mess i can get us into. And i had a scare last year , thankfully no real problems occurred
Yes, it is good that I did this when I had the time to sort it out and not when my account was under attack!
Well that would be a worse nightmare. We have seen it in the terminal a few times and the panic is understandably big
It turned out that it wasn't that at all and somehow like a fool had pasted a picture link with my key.First time I have done that. Good to get your keys in order though as you should always be in control.
I agree, it is something that I should have done a long time ago and I neglected it.
awwww. i accidentally did that one day and the system warned me before posting. I guess that didn't happen in your situation. Sorry it happened to you though brotha!
You do mean that you posted a src link with your posting key instead of a url right?
Yes this is exactly what happened. I have never done this before and 24 minutes after posting some weasel is already taking the goods.
wow, that took no time at all. i wonder how they knew? it must be a script that is searching every post for exactly that.
Well, glad you preemptively did something about the issue.
Me too!
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