Gaming Company Hacked!

Zamphyr

Master of the Pan Flute
Joined
Oct 30, 2002
Messages
464
Location
New Jersey
Figured I'd put this article here as it involves various legal issues as well as gaming.

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?threadid=10692

Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve. Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.

Here is what we know:

1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.

2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.

3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.

4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.

5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).

6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.

Well, this sucks.

What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great.

We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to help us take care of these problems than this community.

Gabe Newell
Managing Director
Valve Software

This is pretty big as Half Life 2 is one of the most anticipated games of the last few years. It will be interesting to see if they can find the original hackers and what they will be charged with.
 
Wow....I wonder how this is going to change the game companies' policies....No more email for you! :)
 
Given, this may be a hoax as the only source I can find for this news so far is this Half Life forums....if it doesn't hit Wired in the next day or so, consider me gulible.
 
Well, if it's true, then let's hope the responsible party (if you can call such people responsible) is caught. I hate hackers; they make life online a living hell.

And we don't need anyone screwing around with Half-life 2.
 
lol. i actualy find this funny.
disclamer: i'm usualy on the side of the hackers in these cases.

my understanding would be that most hackers are also gamers. And so i think game companies should be extra carefull about hackers as they have something that a good hacker could REALY want (much like a bank).

the fact that someone was able to steal the source code for HL-2 is an amazing feat (assuming that it wasnt an inside job).
and i would congratulate that person rather then turn him in.

i dont see how the stolen code can delay the gam ethough. unless ofcourse the hakcer deleted the orginal, which would just be distructive and i wouldnt like that.
 
Its true.. and it really sucks for valve. All the work they've done on various engines for HL2 is probably gonna be more or less down the drain....
 
2 years of work ruined, damn, just when I developed a taste for the game... This means that Valve will either release HL2, with stolen code and all, or delay the release for a few months to make it a better game.
 
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