Steam hacked, Valve confirm

Just a heads up: Valve has informed that they learnt that their Steam forum being hacked went beyond the forums and intruders got into a database with personal info, which was encrypted if I understand things correctly. They say :"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."

Normally this wouldn't affect me at all, as I havent been using Steam till recently as I installed Steam client due to Football Manager 12 being available solely through them this year. (edit: you can buy the disc in the store,which i did, but have to activate the game and have Steam installed to run the game). And since I havent bought the game through Steam with credit card I'm personally not worried about that. As for those that have purchased via Steam, Valve advices as stated above that altough they have no evidence of credit card misuse so far, you should watch your credit card activity and statement closely nonetheless.

I have however changed the Steam account password just in case, even though I dont use steam forums/have not steam forum account. Valve's comment on acounts/paswords: "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.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.


An overall note, didn't wanna cause any panic with this post, only give a heads up to those who haven't been aware of it yet, so I edited it for further info/explanation. That said, ofcourse monitoring how this situation develops (which hopefully wont in a negative way), , goes without saying.

The entire statement from Valve bellow.

[arstechnica.com]

Quote
from Steam forums
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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GPGSL career;
Current team: Team ShadowSubaru, Previous teams: MPR, Minardi
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winner of Belgian GP (s1), Australian GP (s1), Canadian GP (S1), Brazilian GP(s4, s5), Hungarian GP(s3), Italian GP(s3), French GP (s5,s7), Monaco GP (s4) and USA GP



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/11/2011 04:42PM by BAR#10.