After a day or two of speculation, Valve has officially confirmed to the public that the Steam database suffered a security breach earlier this week. Valve Software co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell issued a statement to members letting them know what happened and if there might some concerns about the security of their Steam accounts. The take-away for Steam account holders is that passwords were "hashed and salted" and credit card information was encrypted. Still Newell cautions Steam users to pay attention to their account activity. The full statement is below:
"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."
As Newell noted in his statement, it never hurts to change your password. In fact changing your password regularly and not using the same password at multiple sites is always a good idea.
Source: VentureBeat
Comments
Re: Valve Confirms Steam Security Breach
Not worried either until it's confirmed that credit card data was taken (from what I remember, they only said it was "accessed" and not necessarily "copied") and could easily be decrypted. Passwords are hashed and salted making them next to impossible to decrypt even with the salt key.
Re: Valve Confirms Steam Security Breach
If there's one thing positive to say about this whole debacle, it's that Valve takes their customer information seriously. After the clusterf*** that was Sony this spring, I like the levels of security that Valve has and their pro-active steps they've taken.
It's also refreshing to see Valve being so forthright about what happened. Honesty is, after all, the best policy.
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Re: Valve Confirms Steam Security Breach
My questions are: WHO did this and WHY. While Hacktivism, plain old attacks or terror attacks are all too common nowadays, they are not all the same. Also a source of worry: No one claimed the attack yet. When someone claims it, it's usually part of an attempt to get attention. When no one does, well, they usually are either after secrets (like credit cards) or have something to prove.
Re: Valve Confirms Steam Security Breach
So, who's next?
Or, perhaps just as importantly, who have they attempted to breach and failed?
Because everybody's a target these days.
Re: Valve Confirms Steam Security Breach
I'm not worries since my account logged in seamlessly, still, this is alarming.
Re: Valve Confirms Steam Security Breach
The breach at Kotaku a while back prompted me to replace my "one or two passwords that I use everywhere" scheme with a system of different randomly generated passwords for each account, with a program to help me keep track of them. So fortunately, I didn't have to change much this time.