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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

I used to have a 7 digit ICQ number of mostly 3s, like 3335133 or something like that. It totally wasn't worth the hassle of random Russians trying to buy/scam it from me.

Same thing happened on a smaller scale when I had the apparently rare 'white earbuds' in my Steam account.

The easiest thing is just to give it away and find something better to do with your time.

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I got into ICQ when it was really new so I had an ICQ number in the 15,000s. I changed my password once and it broke.

I reached out to ICQ support and they sent me an email saying "Thanks for reaching out, your current password is:

Have a nice day!"

Gave up after that. lol.

I also had a 7 digit ICQ number, were the lower ones actually (relatively speaking) valuable in this regard?

I had a <1M Twitter UserID# and lost the account after self-suspending it and someone squatted the name.

If only it's easy to remember/type. 5 or 6 digits had the real value.

As for account protection, S in ICQ stands for security.

..and they refuse to change password (last time checked about a year ago) for my 6 digit id. That's secure.

Current owner of the messenger has always had open door policy for russian law enforcement organizations, so any changes since 2010 couldn't be counted as secure.

edit: Also, the recently published analysis of the data on available in-the-wild (authentication isn't supported! firewall rules were deleted due to requests for it of the end users! some of the data is on shodan.io!!!) mandatory for ISPs traffic tampers made "to help russian police with investigations" showed that it has client's IP - ICQ UIN mapping.

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