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
1) The guy in charge of network security at Valve isn't worth a nickel in salary.
2) Gabe Newell really has no fucking clue. Sure Gabe, piss everyone off by chanting September 30th as if it was a Divine Mantra for Enlightenment, only to tell the entire community "Fuck you, you WILL use our shitty delivery system if you want to play", followed by "Fuck you again, it's not done yet, so September 30th ain't happening", a week before that supposedly sacrosanct date.
And now you want the community to HELP you track down some meany haxx0rs that trundled all over your pisspoor security? Something tells me it's not really going to happen.
Also, I'd really like to know exactly what Gabe expects the community to actually DO about this. If his firewall and sniffer logfiles don't show anything, how the fuck is some joe schmoe on IRC supposed to find out anything? Unless he's expecting the perp to be bragging about it (or will be, or has been bragging about it, take your pick), which seems unlikely, given the fact he / she / they seemed to know what they were doing.
But seriously, keystroke recorders? We figured out how to get rid of those in the early 90's, Valve...
Maybe it's a modder who doesn't want to wait any longer...
Creston
2) Gabe Newell really has no fucking clue. Sure Gabe, piss everyone off by chanting September 30th as if it was a Divine Mantra for Enlightenment, only to tell the entire community "Fuck you, you WILL use our shitty delivery system if you want to play", followed by "Fuck you again, it's not done yet, so September 30th ain't happening", a week before that supposedly sacrosanct date.
And now you want the community to HELP you track down some meany haxx0rs that trundled all over your pisspoor security? Something tells me it's not really going to happen.
Also, I'd really like to know exactly what Gabe expects the community to actually DO about this. If his firewall and sniffer logfiles don't show anything, how the fuck is some joe schmoe on IRC supposed to find out anything? Unless he's expecting the perp to be bragging about it (or will be, or has been bragging about it, take your pick), which seems unlikely, given the fact he / she / they seemed to know what they were doing.
But seriously, keystroke recorders? We figured out how to get rid of those in the early 90's, Valve...
Maybe it's a modder who doesn't want to wait any longer...
Creston
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