Tiffany Kaiser - November 11, 2011 9:27 AM
While no evidence of credit card fraud has yet been evident, all Steam users will be required to change their passwords for the Steam forums
This year already has quite a few hacking-related blemishes on record that compromised both government and corporate systems. Now, another can be added to the long list of those who have been targeted in 2011: Steam.
Steam is a digital distribution, multiplayer and communications platform created by American video game developer Valve Corporation. It offers catalogues by several major game publishers such as EA, Rockstar Games, Bethesda Softworks, Activision and Square Enix. As of October 2011, there were 35 million active user accounts and 1,400 games available on Steam.
Gabe Newell, co-founder and managing director of Valve, announced that the Steam forums suffered a security breach Sunday that compromised Steam users' personal details.
While no evidence of credit card fraud has yet been evident, all Steam users will be required to change their passwords for the Steam forums. It will not be required that they change their passwords for their actual Steam accounts, but doing so wouldn't hurt.
The following is the official statement from Newell:
Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.
We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.
We don't have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.
While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.
We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn't be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.
We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.
I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.
Gabe.
This isn't Valve's first cyber attack. Back in 2007, a hacker known as "MaddoxX" bypassed Valve's security system and accessed customers' credit card information, screenshots of internal Valve Web pages, financial information on Valve, error logs and some of Valve's Cafe directory.
