Steam Hacked, Personal Information Could Be Compromised

Valve boss Gabe Newell has confirmed that Steam has been hacked, and that customer information including email addresses, credit card details and passwords may have been compromised. While there has been no confirmation of any details in the hands of hackers, Valve cannot rule it out at this stage.

This news comes after the Steam Forums were attacked and defaced on Sunday, and after further investigation, Valve has found that the intrusion was greater than it had previously thought.

While Valve has no evidence of any stolen card details or compromised Steam accounts, Newell urged users to change their details just in case. Some forum accounts have been confirmed compromised, so it would be a good idea to get on there and change your details as soon as possible. The full statement from Newell to Steam users can be found below.

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.

Have you been affected by this? What do you think of this latest hacking in the games industry? Let us know in the comments below. We again urge you to keep an eye on your personal data in the wake of Steam being hacked. Let’s hope it gets cleared up soon.