Ladies and Gentleman, it has been confirmed that Valve’s Steam service has been compromised. Last week there was a report that only the forums had been hacked, however the situation seems far more dire than first thought. Valve’s Gabe Newell has stated that the hackers gained access to: user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. It is not known if the information was cracked or not yet.

Valve fortunately took more precautions in protecting its user’s information. Most of the information that is important was heavily encrypted and may not have been touched. Valve is not forcing Steam customers to change their passwords because of the heavy encryption, Valve is confident that no passwords were compromised. Mr. Newell says that it may still be a good idea to change your Steam password though. Below is a statement sent out by Gabe Newell:

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.

(UPDATE)

Gabe Newell has said in an e-mail that users of the Steam service will be getting free games. Dota 2 and Portal 2. So if you haven’t bought either then enjoy!

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