Thursday, November 10th 2011
Steam Hack More Severe Than Thought: Change Your Password NOW
Gabe Newell of Valve has issued a statement that the forum hack they experienced over the weekend actually goes much deeper than they thought. The criminals accessed the main database containing such goodies as user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. Apparently, no personally identifying information was taken - but we await the result of the full investigation before breathing a sigh of relief. Due to this serious breach, TechPowerUp advises all Steam users to change their account password immediately. People starting up their Steam client will now see the following message from Gabe Newell about this:
10 November 2011
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.
127 Comments on Steam Hack More Severe Than Thought: Change Your Password NOW
I've always been asking myself, who needs that friggin' Steam and all other on-line services of the likes, anyway? :shadedshu
Just take our money for the game, give us a decent server for on-line play (should we feel like it) that only requires a user ID and a password to log into and quit squeezing credit card info and such from your customers, ffs. Geez!
BTW, Wouldn't Steam Guard be more than enough for protection ? Unless you're E-mail is also compromised.
Real problem is that they got some credit card data, IMO.
updated:
looks like credit card data was encrypted with aes256 (according to some comments @ toms), so no worries i guess.
That said, Gabe also mentions to change your Steam pass "just in case". So yeah.
It might be a bit expensive and time consuming, but a company that operates 100% online could go out of business if they were seen as having poor security, so I reckon this is a possibility.
All steam said to do is what you as a non retarded consumer should be doing anyway, watching your statements to make sure your not getting double charged, over charged, etc....
Sorry if I sound like an ass, but all this uppity make news out of nothing more then a Game Hack Website putting their ad into suddenly this being a full blown end of your credit score attack is retarded.
Your god damn topic title breaks forum rules as FUD.. Nowhere have I seen them doing anything besides covering their ass and doing what anyone whos had a forum hack done and resetting forum passwords. If they honestly had any hint that your accounts on a completely different presumably much better defended server had been compromised they would have also reset your steam account passwords.
So basically, the forum is a representive of itself. It's not related to Steam at all. They're probably making fuss with the hopes of some guy that can't login to open a new account then buy the games again. lol.
Thing is, I wouldn't feel too cozy that everything is all right. Think of the security breaches one sees with companies (not just gaming companies) who offer bland assurances that their customer's details are ok and then it turns out that the sh*t has hit the fan. Fact is, we just don't know yet and may never know, so it's a reasonable precaution to change our passwords.
Even if they did hack, your account is one out of millions. What's the chance of a few kids messing with yours out of millions? I personally am not concerned about this. And not going to change mine. They're hyping this for people to make new accounts.
also, while the chances may be small - my account is worth over $4k USD, i am not risking that to a friggin password, i'll change it thanks :)
But WHO would make new accounts? noone... Who in the world would abandon their Steam account for this and not just change their password etc?