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Gabe Newell, founder and CEO of Valve Software, has announced that the online digital store, game library and multiplayer network has experienced a security breach and data loss. The announcement, released today (Thursday), began with the news that the Steam forums had been "defaced" in an attack on Sunday, and went on:
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.
Once the jitters have subsided, this doesn't look on face value as bad as it might. The greatest danger is probably to those who used the same password for their Steam and Steam forums accounts, or - worse - have been using the same password for multiple accounts, including their email. This is particularly dangerous as, along with probably providing a means to obtain passwords for every other online service connected to that address, it invalidates the Steam Guard protection, introduced in March, which requires verification by email whenever a user's Steam account is accessed from a new computer.
"My steam account is worth more than my bank account"
Security failures are a nightmare for Steam and its users, not least because they highlight the fragility of the cloud. By making all games purchased through Steam accessible for download at any time, Steam is a great way for gamers to buy far more games than they could ever fit on their hard drives, or their shelves. Commenting on the PC gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun, one dismayed player commented
My steam account is worth more than my bank account
In short, panic is not required, but vigilance would be welcome - and if you have used the same password across multiple services (a) don't do that and (b) change your passwords.
Valve's size and dominance in the digital download market, with over 30 million registered accounts, makes this a source of concern. On the plus side, the evidence is at least that Steam's identity protection has been doing the right things in the event of a security failure. The passwords captured are hashed and salted - although a short, simple password may still be vulnerable to a brute-force attack, depending on the level of encryption, as they were when Gawker's database was compromised.
With Electronic Arts pushing their own download service, Origin, hard, this could have come at a better time for Steam. However, as the story stands at the moment it is wholly survivable. When the PlayStation Network was hack in April, there was much anger, but in the end the value provided by PSN was sufficiently great that by June network activity was back to 90% of pre-hack levels. As long as Steam is contrite, service is not badly disrupted and the consequences are not unexpectedly severe, this should be a manageable crisis.
Of greater concern over the long term is the possible use of the unencrypted data in social engineering attacks. Once lost, customer data can never be recaptured, and one suspects that these reported cases are only the tip of an iceberg of slow leaks of lost, sold or stolen data. At some point, the way data is customer stored and associated will need to be examined. But this will not be the tipping point.
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