Most serious gamers will have noticed that the Steam forums have been defaced on Sunday (November 6th). Valve is taking this very serious (as they should, it’s a major way to lose loyal customers) and Gabe has personally posted a message out to all Steam s. You can read his message below:
Dear Steam s and Steam Forum s,
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 names, hashed and salted s, 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 s 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 s that have been compromised, all forum s will be required to change their s the next time they . If you have used your Steam forum on other s you should change those s as well.
We do not know of any compromised Steam s, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam s (which are separate from forum s). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum .
We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.
I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.
Gabe.
Well done Gabe, that’s how you speak to your customers and keep them informed. There are a few companies who could learn from this (Stardock, I am looking at you – with Mr-Obnoxious-Frogboy.)
So what do you think? If you ask me, I just wonder why people don’t have anything better to do than to hack things which server as people’s primary form of entertainment. It’s probably done by people who either don’t like Steam or don’t like PC Gaming. (Though we find the latter hard to believe) You don’t see a bunch of hockey players running onto a football pitch and destroying everything and then running off just because they like a different sport. Why should it be any different in gaming? Grow up already, seriously.