Steam Hacked — Personal Information Compromised (Still No Half-Life 3)

Valve boss Gabe Newell has come out and released an official statement, confirming that the Steam forum was recently hacked and that some personal user information was also accessed.

Compromised information includes users’ personal details which include credit card information, emails and passwords.

So far there have been no reports of credit card fraud as a result of the security breach, but users are being asked to change their passwords on the Steam forums.

It is advised that you change your Steam account’s password for safety’s sake, despite it not being related to your forum account. On that note, I need to change mine. Now. Once I remember what my old one was, that is…

If anything, the lesson here is pretty clear: Valve, you need to give out more Dota 2 beta keys before the shit really hits the fan.

Here’s the official statement from the man himself:

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.