Steam Database compromised?

[Newbility]

Original Source: Game Informer

 

Valve said today its Steam database was hacked last weekend and that personal information' date=' including names, e-mails, and encrypted credit card information may have been compromised.

 

A message from Valve president Gabe Newell says the company learned of the intrusion on Sunday and originally believed only its forums were breached. Valve eventually learned intruders accessed the database in addition to the forums.

 

The company said that while it has not seen any misuse of credit card information, members should monitor their credit activity closely.

 

Below is the full letter from Gabe Newell:

 

 

Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users,

 

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.

 

 

Please be careful Steam and Skyrim players alike. Take as much counter measures as possible. I am hoping for the best and godspeed to everyone.

[teals03]

These attacks seem to be becoming increasly prevalent. All the more reason to believe that Walmart is just one step closer to complete world domination! But in all seriousness this sucks, and I dont need to put cyber-terrorism on my already long of list of crap that I need to worry about all the time.

[fiabundem]

im afraid that its already too late my friend cyber terrorism is indeed something you need to worry about. As we are becoming more of a data based society, more and more info and personal information is being placed on the web and up for grabs by these people. so be careful ppl

[HentaiGnome]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: No one (and I literally mean "no one") is safe from cyberterrorism. So long as you own a device that has a network port (either wireless or physical) hackers will find a way to compromise your system if they want to. That's why I found it laughable when people complained about Sony being attacked and "threatening" to switch over to Microsoft's Xbox. Yeah, like that was going to achieve anything.

 

Sony wasn't the first but it certainly was one of the more major companies to get attacked, which is why it received headlines news. (I do admit their late response to the matter was questionable.) At the time, Sony was FoTM. Soon after, Codemasters was hit. A few other companies got rolled over, too, and now we're hearing news about Steam. It just goes to show it doesn't matter who's who, and it's not a question of "if" either, but rather "when".

 

At the moment Microsoft Xbox Live is just lucky that they haven't been attacked. Frankly, I don't think it would be wise for hackers to attack them since there is a much larger fanbase for Xbox Live (and I assume some hackers enjoy the service themselves) so it would be stupid and pointless to attack a service that they themselves may use. Besides, most users get affected by viruses and more "personal" hacker attacks just by simply using Windows...

 

All in all, I'm upset that this is what cyberterrorism has amounted to. It's one thing to be against corporations but why bring down everyone else with it? Honestly...

[Guest Loogie]

All in all' date=' I'm upset that this is what cyberterrorism has amounted to. It's one thing to be against corporations but why bring down everyone else with it? Honestly...

[/quote']

 

Who knows, maybe Microsoft has decent security for their Xbox information? The hackers who attacked PSN used the same technique against a public CIA website - the only effect was the website was slowed down for about 5 minutes. A CIA public relations person told the media what the hackers did to them was like "Trying to bring down a bridge using graffiti."

 

While a corporation probably couldn't be as secure with their information as a major government, that doesn't mean a corporation can't do better than laughably bad.