On November 10th, Gabe Newell issued a statement
on the Steam Forums' main page advising users that the forums had been defaced,
accounts compromised, and that databases with sensitive information had been
accessed. A news alert was also issued
through the Steam client. The breached
databases included user names, purchase histories, email addresses, passwords,
and credit card information.
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.
Though the credit card information and passwords were both
independently protected, the other information could be useful for compromising
other accounts outside of Steam. As the
statement said, any accounts users might have that use the same password as
their Steam login should be changed immediately. In the meantime, forum services have been
restored.
