Warp2Search.net » News » October 2003 » Gabe Newell I need the assistance of the community

Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve.

Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.

Here is what we know:



1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.

2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.

3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.

4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.

5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).

6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.

Well, this sucks.

What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great.

We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to help us take care of these problems than this community.

Gabe

hinkle Unregistered

#47887 Posted on: 10/03/2003 11:06 AM wrong, the source code tree zipped is only 30mb (unpacked about 160mb). But if you wanted to download all the content which cannot be zipped as good as code file (text files) you would end up with above 1gb of data. Way too much to get illegally of a PC

El_Coyote Senior Member Posts: 555 Joined: 2002-12-18

#47888 Posted on: 10/03/2003 12:05 PM well exchange is essential for a lot of people.

Devourer Unregistered

#47890 Posted on: 10/03/2003 03:04 PM "Gabe Newell I need the assistance of the community" I don't think this could be a bigger load of sh*t.... Go cry to your mommy Gabe.. All you people falling for this sob story (we love the community when we have a disaster) gotta be drooling HL fanboys... I have 2 words for you all.. 1st. Company! 2nd. Steam! Any of you think this company really cares so much for the community, send me an email.. I got some land for sale on Ur-anis.. help@blowme.com

Noodlez Junior Member Posts: 1 Joined: 2003-06-13

#47891 Posted on: 10/03/2003 04:13 PM yeah cause the 8GB of crap I d/l'ed yesterday wasn't possable I forgot

The_truth Unregistered

#47892 Posted on: 10/03/2003 04:16 PM Im not sure why you would be so anti-valve. What have they done ? Dont say 'delay HL2'. Most games get delayed, hell Doom3 has been promised for years and years. Maybe a lot of the recent delays and lack of information is due to this hacking. Steam is flawed but a good idea.

hinkle Unregistered

#47897 Posted on: 10/03/2003 09:29 PM you downloaded crap which was obtained most probably because the CDs got leak during the manufacturing process. This is different, the hacker had no physical access to the file, just a backdoor implemented in Gabe's PC. Try there download 1Gb and more without getting caugt. Big difference

shaderboy Unregistered

#47900 Posted on: 10/03/2003 09:49 PM Wow i missed this one (on holiday) !! Poor guys that is terrible, id be gutted if it happened to me. I doesnt matter how or why it happened, it happened and all those who think its funny should remember that when you play HL2 in future and be ashamed because you dont deserve to play it.

hinkle Unregistered

#47913 Posted on: 10/04/2003 11:39 AM Unfortunately I have to agree with you. Months of rumors about the delay, nothing from valve. They didn't care to inform their "community" although was inevitable even without the leak. Now suddenly valve needs the help of the community and coincidently now Gabe claims he always cared for his "community"... Whatever What about the benchmark? Not a single word was lost on this subject. Too bad the whole game content has also been stolen and is currently being prepared to get released as a full working HL2 beta some time later next week...

Warp2Search.net » News » October 2003 » Gabe Newell I need the assistance of the community