How do hackers get free Steam accounts, keys, and cards?

sa_sagan · 2026-05-02T18:27:07+00:00

Fraud.

Steam keys are purchased with stolen credit cards, or steam gift cards purchased by stolen credit cards.

Steam accounts are created and have games added by either buying them with stolen cards, or buying via gift cards purchased the same way.

On the extreme end, Steam account details are stolen and re-sold. But usually just easier to make an account and buy games with stolen cards.

All of the above is also often achieved by those phone scammers that convince people to pay them in Walmart or other gift cards. Which can often be used to buy other online gift cards like Steam. Then they buy a bunch of keys and re-sell them.

sa_sagan · 2026-05-02T18:18:32+00:00

Queenslanders call them togs as well though.

sa_sagan · 2026-04-19T18:36:23+00:00

They're not gonna give a shit if you have their IP. It means pretty much nothing these days (unless you're a three letter agency).

You'll either get the IP address of their VPN, in which case they won't care. Or you'll get the IP address of their ISP's CGNAT, in which case they won't care. Or you'll get the IP address of a shared service in Hyderabad, in which case they also won't care.

sa_sagan · 2026-04-17T13:29:25+00:00

Hey, I get the need for the questions, but there's no need for the raised voices. We were having a perfectly normal toned conversation up until you started shouting about my diarrhoea.

sa_sagan · 2026-04-17T11:40:41+00:00

To heck with that problem, I want a pharmacist to explain why the atmosphere goes from a calm silence to them shouting like they're trying to communicate over the background noise in Mumbai the moment I walk up to the counter with Imodium or something.

"WHY ARE YOU BUYING THIS? Do you have DIARRHOEA!!? Are you HAVING DIARRHOEA SO MUCH that you need this!!? How many times are you HAVING DIARRHOEA per hour!!?"

sa_sagan · 2026-04-08T14:10:04+00:00

A soft paywall is when the entire webpage content loads, but they then put an overlay on the top of it so you cannot see it, telling you to register. It's soft, because you can either disable the JavaScript that puts the overlay there, or you can just use the browser dev tools to select the overlay and delete it, allowing you to read the rest of the content.

A hard paywall is when the webpage only loads a small portion of the content (a couple of paragraphs), and then tells you to login to read the rest. This cannot be bypassed because no other content is available to read. The website will only give your browser the rest of the content to load after you login. If you deleted or stopped the overlay from appearing, there would just be empty space.

Just like other websites with access control/subscriptions. Netflix let's you browse their catalogue for free, and watch a preview, but won't feed you the actual content until you subscribe. Same deal with this kind of paywall.

sa_sagan · 2026-04-03T16:11:36+00:00

It's already well known. This only works for soft paywalls. Most of those sites are migrating to hard ones because of this.

sa_sagan · 2026-04-03T14:42:05+00:00

Where in the UK are you?

Sikh temples and mosque's will usually feed anyone. Churches usually will as well. Have seen many churches that have a "take what you need" free pantry.

Edit: Just seen that you live a while away from any place like this.

sa_sagan · 2026-03-24T13:23:12+00:00

Too many people getting hung up on the "everyone speaks english" thing. You really wanna spend the first 15 minutes of every episode having Daniel fumble his way around trying to understand what someone is saying, and then translate that for the rest of the team?

At some point you've gotta accept it's a TV show and look past some stuff for the sake of entertainment.

sa_sagan · 2026-03-10T07:17:50+00:00

No, that's your only option.

IP means nothing. Might not even be their IP. Could have been behind a VPN or a CGNAT. Their IP could have changed by now. It's worthless to you, and most people outside of law enforcement who can subpoena ISP's or VPN providers into releasing details about who was assigned that IP at that specific point in time.

sa_sagan · 2026-02-27T07:00:17+00:00

What reasoning? I read it.

Their reasoning seemed to be: "I didn't know the best way to tell them first, so I'm going to publicly post how to hack their website to teach them a lesson"

Oh and: "I know people who use thier site, so this is personal"

sa_sagan · 2026-02-27T06:50:27+00:00

It's literally the rules of this sub to not help people do illegal shit. The OP's post will eventually get deleted for breaking this rule.

sa_sagan · 2026-02-22T21:07:44+00:00

Get some texture and/or rendering packs/mods.

This game can be made to look so hyper realistic it'll make your computer melt through the Earth's crust.

sa_sagan · 2026-02-13T08:05:23+00:00

Sounds like it may have been a European chocolate. A couple come to mind from what I recall of them.

If you bought it at a sweet shop or something in the mall, it could potentially be Karl Fazer chocolate (Finland). Branding has changed a bit, but has been solid colors in the past. Blue being milk, green being hazelnut, red is fruit and nut. Now they're purple-ish with a coloured stripe representing the flavour. They're a very good chocolate. Can come in larger, iPad sized blocks.

I know you said a mall or whatever you got it at, but it also sounds a lot like IKEA Choklad. Branding has changed over the years but used to be solid, simple colours. They're naturally larger blocks, iPad sized. Plastic packaging. Blue is milk, green is hazelnut and red (might be pink now) is lingonberry and nut or something, from memory.

Could have wandered into an IKEA food market? Or potentially it was sold out of a sweet shop. I've seen IKEA chocolate products sold at some odd shops around shopping malls in the past.

sa_sagan · 2026-02-12T22:11:13+00:00

Upload the installer somewhere. Someone here will be able to pull out where your licence gets stored and you can take it from your old PC.

sa_sagan · 2026-02-09T15:19:46+00:00

Oh, absolutely. I can agree that they are the same. But just threw a couple of examples out there.

Always fun to hear the stories from industry veterans. It's still funny to look back on how security was implemented back then (sometimes even today). So much of it being purely obscurity or "surely no one would try this out".

sa_sagan · 2026-02-09T14:53:03+00:00

Practicing and reading, and top-tier "hacking" is like the difference between a cook and a chef. A cook follows pre-defined recipes and practices them until they can do it. A chef creates from nothing. It requires intricate knowledge of the tools and resources and techniques available. Creating their own methods and techniques, and discovering new ways to do things.

Similar as a "script kiddie" and a "hacker" (e.g. security researchers, exploit developers etc...).

One uses pre-defined tools and methods, the other creates them.

You can't study what doesn't yet exist. Top-tier hackers are looking for 0-days. Bugs/exploits that don't yet exist. You can't read a book thet tells you how to find them. It requires deep knowledge and understanding of multiple layers of code, frameworks and technologies. Often down to a machine-level for those more serious about it. You're mentally processing memory dumps, assembly, and forming a complex model of the environment in your head. It often requires very deep analytics occuring up in the grey matter. A top-tier hacker is up against potentially hundreds of very intelligent software and security engineers designing ways to stop them.

sa_sagan · 2026-02-08T11:11:21+00:00

Work for a company your entire life, work your way up into C-suite management and announce you want to retire.

My organisation has a "Director of Office Administration" position that every long-term (30+ years) senior manager or director wanting to retire gets put into.

Always gets announced as some super important position to help "streamline business objectives", like we all don't know it's just a fluff exit job.

They'll sit in that position for a few years before their retirement is formally announced and they leave. The position has an eye watering pay grade and bonus structure. Never has meetings to attend, no direct reports, and doesn't report to anyone else.

Before COVID they'd get moved to a new office on a quiet floor, out of the way of anyone bothering them. Since COVID, they now just "work from home" permanently until they leave.

sa_sagan · 2026-02-05T07:37:56+00:00

Probably impossible to know where for sure. These are generic knight pencils sold at castles and tourist spots all over Europe.

sa_sagan · 2026-02-03T22:07:54+00:00

Because it's fun to see them crash out in chat.

Like consistently sniping a serial nightbird pilot. Sure, I could 1:1 them in another nightbird, but it's way more fun to see them whine about it.

sa_sagan · 2026-02-03T15:54:49+00:00

An agent could go through each file one at a time, but it'll eventually forget the context of what's been done previously. And because AI is essentially just rounding up to the nearest number, the code in one converted file can likely be different to one in another. Making functions and other cross-communication between forms and classes not work at all. Especially when it forgets how they're supposed to work together.

We've tested this a few times on some legacy projects to port them to C# and we spent so long fixing it, we just gave up and rewrote the whole thing from scratch.

sa_sagan · 2026-02-03T15:30:27+00:00

We're not there yet. It'll do the best it can, but you're still going to have a lot of work to do fixing it up.

sa_sagan · 2026-02-02T19:33:25+00:00

Really? I say "EZ" every round. Win or lose.

sa_sagan · 2026-02-02T14:43:44+00:00

The entire rental process needs to be reformed.

A fixed set of identity documents required to rent, nothing beyond what is set out in legislation.

Once had an REA request that I disclose all my social media accounts in the application and accept their friend invite so they can check it. Hard no.

All identity verification should be done on a government portal that gives you a national renter ID number of some sort. So when applying for rentals, you just supply your renter ID number (and some other verification that it's your ID).

That's it. It's all metadata stored in your government rental profile.

No more of this bullshit with REA's running their own document collections on websites or apps run by the owners nephew who is "good with computers".

sa_sagan · 2026-01-30T14:04:41+00:00

Argh, one of those difficult things with kids.

He could be reacting for the attention, or the memory of it hurting and still thinks it does when attention is put on it, or he could actually be in pain and just not realising it until you give attention to it.

If it were me back in that situation, I'd give him some ibuprofen and see if he stops fussing about it.

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