Valve Hacked. Your Info may be at risk

Street · 18 Apr 2007 at 23:04

Smells like BS to me.. :rolleyes:

As said before, looks like one of those annoying chain emails my mum tends to email me a lot..

gord · 18 Apr 2007 at 23:15

I read recently that e-tailers who get hacked have severe drops in sales. People actually take notice. But this sounds like hackers just trying to discredit Valve and Steam without any sort of proof..

Then again, i hope my card details are not spread all over the net.

Sinque · 18 Apr 2007 at 23:19

gord said:
Then again, i hope my card details are spread all over the net.

Post them here and your wish will be granted

gord · 18 Apr 2007 at 23:31

Sinque said:
Post them here and your wish will be granted

Hmm yes, must have had a brain fart at that point..

dbmzk1 · 19 Apr 2007 at 02:36

It's clearly a hoax.

I've downloaded the file and theres nothing in it that couldn't be faked.

Pixel · 19 Apr 2007 at 03:00

More spelling mistakes in that "news" story than an English class for chavs.

steve258 · 19 Apr 2007 at 10:43

fen739 said:
Thank god, like others, I haven't bought anything off Steam (not that I know why people would when they could get a nice CD + manual etc).

Have they denied it's happened or just not commented?

Err because it's considerably cheaper? Well some of the games anyway.

Elston · 19 Apr 2007 at 10:47

Is it not a little strange that Valve have not said anything to try and stop this BS. I would have thought that as it has potential to discredit the company they would have said something to deny it. :confused:

But then Valve are not the best when it comes to public relations, think they must have taken a leaf out of 3D Realms book!

Surfer · 19 Apr 2007 at 11:10

steve258 said:
Err because it's considerably cheaper? Well some of the games anyway.

is it? when you say considerably do you mean £5 or £10 cheaper or what? any examples? If its really that cheap then sure i'd definately think about buying games via steam.....but i havent seen any games that cheap on steam that i couldnt get elsewhere for nearly the same price except you get the disk, manual, box, and other extras.

steve258 · 19 Apr 2007 at 11:40

Surfer said:
is it? when you say considerably do you mean £5 or £10 cheaper or what? any examples? If its really that cheap then sure i'd definately think about buying games via steam.....but i havent seen any games that cheap on steam that i couldnt get elsewhere for nearly the same price except you get the disk, manual, box, and other extras.

When I got the HL2 Episode 1 it was $19 which was about £10 plus you get to pre-load it and play it on the day of release.

When i said considerably cheaper I was comparing the price with the high street shop. HL2 EP1 at the time of release was £19.99 in a major high street game retailer.

When I got my original HL2 from retail it came with nothing but a DVD and and a card that refers you to their webpage for manuals... so much for the extras. :rolleyes:

Plus for some if not most of the games you will need to register with steam anyway to even play the game so it's not like you don't have the Internet to download it straight from steam.

I'm not saying it's the case for all games as a lot of games are now distributed through steam since the original HL2 was released. There are a few games on there that I know of can be bought and played completely independent from steam.

Phyre · 19 Apr 2007 at 12:05

I'm not sure if this actually a hoax... I've just been reading the website (which I'm not going to show) and it looks pretty convincing. I'm getting quite worried now cause I've paid for games on Steam on multiple occasions...

SoapSurgeon · 19 Apr 2007 at 12:21

Surfer said:
is it? when you say considerably do you mean £5 or £10 cheaper or what? any examples? If its really that cheap then sure i'd definately think about buying games via steam.....but i havent seen any games that cheap on steam that i couldnt get elsewhere for nearly the same price except you get the disk, manual, box, and other extras.

i like steam because you always have your games there... so if you format your pc you dont have to search around for your discs you just log into steam and download them again. Never had any problems though as i havent been using it that long

edit: I have a problem with losing games or leaving them on the side so they get so scratched it can be barely read by my dvd drive.

MoNkeE · 19 Apr 2007 at 12:40

Phyre said:
I'm not sure if this actually a hoax... I've just been reading the website (which I'm not going to show) and it looks pretty convincing. I'm getting quite worried now cause I've paid for games on Steam on multiple occasions...

As said before, the details would have to be encrypted, and seeing as the "hacker" has skipped how he's managed to decrpyt all of that sensitive information, I have no inclination to believe any of this to be true

-RaZ

Vtec9k · 19 Apr 2007 at 13:02

I'd hope Valve themselves didn't hold any credit card numbers or much personal details at all. Normally that sort of stuff is never held by the specific company but proccesed and storeed by 3rd party finance companies.

If Valve really have been storing lots of personal details in their own systems and have got comprimised I can see them getting royally screwed by the authorities.

Steam accounts names\passwords on the other hand might be quite easily stolen if they have been hacked.

MikeHunt79 · 19 Apr 2007 at 13:34

Pixel said:
More spelling mistakes in that "news" story than an English class for chavs.

I guess it could have been written by the hacker (maddoxx)... which would make sense as I think he is Russian (english isn't his first language). Hoax or no hoax tho, I'm glad I bought HL2 with cash and not online.

nero120 · 19 Apr 2007 at 14:21

Oh for ****s sake:

1.) Amazingly enough, sensitive information is NOT stored in databases in plain text, it would be encrypted using a salted cryptographic hash function.

2.) Credit card companies have a fraud guarantee

So what do you say, can we skip the moronic "thank god I didn't pay using steam!" posts?

AttackMode · 19 Apr 2007 at 14:25

Fake tbh

Draeger · 19 Apr 2007 at 19:08

Nevertheless, Valve appear to be taking this issue seriously.

I'm privvy to a bit more info than most, being on the webstaff on one of the official Valve forums, and we have been issued "direction" on how to treat threads, posts etc, on any Valve forums, regarding this issue.

I cant go into any detail ( because we dont actually know anything more..lol!!! ) but as far as I am aware, an official statement from Valve will be forthcoming soon. :cool:

furnace · 19 Apr 2007 at 19:58

I don't think it's faked. I've had a look at the files, and yeah it's all fakeable - but it would take some serious time and effort to fake it, and there isn't one inconsistency to make it obviously faked. Surely if it were fake, Valve would have dismissed it instantly - instead it's reached Google News front page and still no official statement yet. We shall see, but my money's on it being real :eek:

The best outcome for this, though, would be for Valve to do whatever the hacker ("MaddoxX") says. MaddoxX is clearly an idiot (a very clever idiot) for hacking into their servers - he's probably going to end up getting himself arrested - but at the same time he seems to just be an irritated customer. Valve have had problems/inconveniences with their software that have needed fixing for a long time, and maybe this will open their eyes to just how ****** off some of their customers are!

malccy · 19 Apr 2007 at 20:06

Thought the law stated that credit card information was only allowed to be stored upto 24hrs max.