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Community Bad News: Valve Says Steam's Been Compromised

By jalexbrown — November 11, 2011
Tags: news steam valve

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According to a post on Steam's forums, the service has been compromised.

If you're a Steam user, you might want to keep an eye on your credit card statements.  According to Gabe Newell, the service's security was breached.  This came in the wake of Steam's forums being "defaced" in the words of Gabe himself, who's explaination can be found in the link below.  Amongst other things he says, "We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time."  Nevertheless, the hacker was able to obtain "...user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information."  It's not clear at this time rather or not all accounts were obtained, but Valve will be encouraging all users to change their passwords.

As of right now Steam's forums are down and will be up "as soon as [they] can [get them up]."

Original source.

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[UPDATED] Nov 11, 2011 11:05:12 AM

Nov 11, 2011 by BatRastered

Full text from Gabe:

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.

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