Steam forum hack addressed by Valve CEO Gabe Newell

Written by Alex Roth on November 14, 2011

Steam News: Last week, Steam's forums were compromised by hackers, and Valve CEO Gabe Newell has directly addressed the community about it.

Valve CEO Gabe Newell released a memo confirming that the forums for Steam, the company's digital distribution network, had suffered an intrusion by hackers. While reiterating that credit card information does not seem to be have been compromised, he asks that users keep a close eye on their respective Visas and Mastercards. This message also appears upon logging into Steam. It reads:

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.

The intrusion is troubling. However, it seems limited to the forums, which means doesn't extend to Steam itself, and there is comfort to be found in this relatively timely message from the man at the top. The attack may have been four days old when the announcement went out, but Newell and his team obviously wanted to have their facts straight, and were quite plain spoken about the incident.

Compare that to the recent hacker intrusion on Xbox Live, which Microsoft has labeled not a hack but Уa way to monetize stolen accountsФ . Right.

There was also the notorious PSN hack of April , where Sony's online network had been down for a week before they addressed customers.

At this time, it us unknown what changes this will mean for Steam, but most likely they will not be on the user's end. Gaming Target will keep you up to date.