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Gamingin the early 2000s was a lot different than it is now.
Anyone remember the good ol days of playing RuneScape?
Not to this old-school gamer, though.
Recently, she shareda storyabout how she got a friends account back from a hacker.
Why the quotation marks?
Bored Pandagot in touch with the Redditor who shared this story, u/TheVaneja.
Read our conversation with her below!
u/TheVaneja says this was her only direct encounter with someone getting their accounthacked.
If he hadnt been taunting my friend and had just vanished, hed have got away with it clean.
There was a forum semi-hidden in the site that was 100% unmoderated.
Oh, the early internet days.
And some stuff Ill spend the rest of my life trying to forget, she adds.
What she means, of course, is that with unmoderated communities come all sorts of nasty individuals.
Well, maybe Im being unfair.
I was still pretty new to the netin 1999;there [were] probably worse places.
The Redditor thinks that the unregulated Internet was way worse back then.
In some ways, Im a strong supporter of free speech.
But some things arent free speech; theyre just horrible crimes.
My frequency of running into horrible crimes today is incalculably small and mostly limited to spoilers.
In 1999, there were things [that gave] one nightmares.
We asked u/TheVaneja what she thinks about the Internet now.
Is it easier to keep ones personal information safe?
But smartphones were still science fiction.
Things have changed a little since, but two-factor [authentication] is the only real change.
Online gaming poses other risks.
As u/TheVaneja mentioned earlier, multi-factor authentication can be a real lifesaver.
MFA also includes biometrics (face and fingerprint ID), one-time codes, and security keys.
Another thing that might save gamers from hackers is updating their hardware and software.
The easiest way to do this is to automate updates so you get notified whenever one is available.
The National Cybersecurity Alliance also recommends using a credit card instead of a debit.
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