If real, the vehicle code says "nitro boost." Woohoo!
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
Not meaning you specifically, but how many people upset about this have no qualms about downloading finished games for whatever reason, like say, the companies are too rich and greedy, etc.? Companies like...say...Valve? (You wouldn't believe how many people were bragging that they'd DL it from Mexico when the pay-to-play hoohaw was going on, at another forum.)Originally posted by: Glitchnydamn this is not good at all, what tool would do this? i mean steal their work like that? ohh i wish we could string him up
Originally posted by: ForbiddenDonut
Practical effect could be multiplayer hacks. It could also be to take down steam (which I'm going to be turning off and recommending to my less computer savvy friends to do the same until some of this gets sorted out). A lot of people don't like steam, or the concept and implications of such a piece of software. Apparently the steam source is included in the source leak, and I'm willing to say that makes steam a potential access point for a hacker.
The implications for valve are huge, however. They're licensing a 3rd party physics engine (Havok), the creators of which will probably not be happy that their engine is openly available on the net. Valve would certainly be liable for the intellectual property. All in all I'd say this sucks. Certainly the biggest hack I've witnessed in the gaming world that I can remember. This is much bigger than a leak of a game or a warezed release of a game.
Originally posted by: rahvin
Originally posted by: ForbiddenDonut
Practical effect could be multiplayer hacks. It could also be to take down steam (which I'm going to be turning off and recommending to my less computer savvy friends to do the same until some of this gets sorted out). A lot of people don't like steam, or the concept and implications of such a piece of software. Apparently the steam source is included in the source leak, and I'm willing to say that makes steam a potential access point for a hacker.
The implications for valve are huge, however. They're licensing a 3rd party physics engine (Havok), the creators of which will probably not be happy that their engine is openly available on the net. Valve would certainly be liable for the intellectual property. All in all I'd say this sucks. Certainly the biggest hack I've witnessed in the gaming world that I can remember. This is much bigger than a leak of a game or a warezed release of a game.
I would doubt a court would hold valve liable for damages, this is akin to someone breaking into an office and stealing something and in that situation a civil court would not hold valve liable at all. Although it might harm the relationship between the two companies I doubt there is a tortous action here.