Half-Life 2 Source Code Leak [Oct 02, 2003, 5:41 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
A post to the Halflife2.net
Forums by Gabe Newell finally has a comment on the leaked Half-Life 2 source
code, brought to the world's attention by Gamer's
With Jobs and Slashdot.
Here's the deal:
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
HIGH_PING - I don't work in Marketting. I make stuff, I don't get involved in selling it. ;-) Most game-designers don't, because they don't care for that side of the business. The fun comes in making the product and seeing people smile when they use it. We sell our work because then we get paid. We want paychecks because we HAVE to have them, if we want to be able to work on it full-time.
Zeph - Oh, I suppose you've never been late for anything in your life? Read my earlier post: If it came out and required an extra patch because of a bug, you'd whine even more! Its a lose-lose situation for Developers; which is why most of them choose to delay instead of release incomplete. Its the lesser of two evils - a late release can be made up for by a superior product; bad bugs will haunt you and your reputation forever. Publishers, on the other hand, have limited funds and patience; and have released games before they were ready on MANY occassions. :-P Its a complex business with a complex set of situations.
Take care,
--Noel "HB" Wade
Zeph - Oh, I suppose you've never been late for anything in your life? Read my earlier post: If it came out and required an extra patch because of a bug, you'd whine even more! Its a lose-lose situation for Developers; which is why most of them choose to delay instead of release incomplete. Its the lesser of two evils - a late release can be made up for by a superior product; bad bugs will haunt you and your reputation forever. Publishers, on the other hand, have limited funds and patience; and have released games before they were ready on MANY occassions. :-P Its a complex business with a complex set of situations.
Take care,
--Noel "HB" Wade
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