Not can beat the feeling of your heart beating faster than normal when you find out that your #steemit account has been compromised and you don't know what to do other than to look like a sheep taking to the slaughter lab. Believe me you won't want to experience it and this post of mine is to help prevent you feeling it and i would be happy if you can #resteem to your followers and call the attention of others.
On the 2nd of this month of July 2018 which happened to be the first working Monday of the month, i discovered an unusual activities taking place on my steemit account after going through my steemd account. My account was upvoting a particular #steem account continuously, at first i thought is something that not serious or a glitch in the system but a visit to that particular account make me to know that there is fire on the mountain and i need to run.
So i hit up my browser and start google search for solution. In my quest for solution, i discovered a lot of things which i think a lot of us here on steemit know nothing about and this things which are activities we carried out using our private key are mostly responsible for most account being compromised because of wrong usage or using them wrongly.
You see those private key on our steemit account are designed to protect our account from being compromised by creating a function and limit of activities performed on our steemit account. The posting key, active key, owner key and memo key, they all can open your steemit account but there is a limit of how far they can go on your account.
The Posting Key
The posting key is used for posting and voting. It should be different from the active and owner keys.
What this mean is that, with this key you can log in and sign out of your steemit account, but once in your steemit account you can post or publish a post, comment and upvote post but your money is safe as this key has no power to authorized financial transaction. So whenever you want to log into your steemit account and other associated website make sure you use this Posting Key to log in
The Active key
The active key is used to make transfers and place orders in the internal market.
This key is the padlock to your wallet on steemit. Without this key you can make financial transactions happen. You leave this key expose then begin to practice saying and waving bye bye to the money in your wallet. In other word guard it very well.
The Owner key
is the master key for the account and is required to change the other keys.
The private key or password for the owner key should be kept offline as much as possible.
***This key is the master key to your steemit account. With this key you can post, comment, upvote, carried out financial transaction, in fact you can do all things the other key do and even more. You misplaced this key that's the end. This key is the generated password you were first given and is not recoverable and you can't request for new one without first
producing the old one and with this key you can change all the key, Posting, active and memo key. All you need to do is to change the owner key and the rest key will change.
Memo key
is used to create and read memos.
This one is use for creating and reading memos but am yet to see how we can do that but if you know how, i will be very happy if you can educate me on it.
So back to the subject matter, after google search i went ahead to put in practical what i learned praying that things should not go amiss. I will like to take you step by step on how i regained my steemit account back and stop the unusual activities of upvoting a particular account. Note this is do it all for all private key.
First click on the wallet tab on your steemit account, once on your wallet page click on the password tab.
First Step : Get your steemit account password, that generated password that was given to you when you signed up for steemit account.
Second Step : Type in your steemit account name in the Account Name box provided
Third Step : in the current password type in or copy and paste in your steemit account password ( that generated password you were given when you first signed up to steemit )
Fourth Step : Click the green colour word in the green rectangular box to generate a new password.
Then write down the new generated password in a paper and keep it somewhere safe for future use or you copy and paste somewhere safe in your system Note this is very very important.
This you must do before going further.
Fifth Step : Into the Re Enter Generated Password, copy and paste or type in the newly generated password which will still be visible, after that check the two agreement box then CLICK ON UPDATE PASSWORD.
Now doing the above action will rendered all the posting, active, memo and owner key useless, you will not be able to access your steemit account with them and the intruder too won't be able to have access because you now have new passwords.
What to do henceforth to safeguard your steemit account.
1- Never you use your Master password which is the owner key which the generated password given to you when you sign up with steemit or the new one you generated before clicking the update password, to log into your steemit account, i repeat never use it to log in unless necessary.
2- Always make use of your posting key to log in into your steemit account and other associated website.
3- To carry out financial transaction never use your master key but your active key.
Now let me stop here and i will be very grateful if you can one or two things to this post so that we be more educated and help safeguard our account.