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
I'm not talking about the kiddies that put "U R Teh Suxx0R!1!!!!!!11!! P2P FOREVAAHH!!!!!!11!!!!!!1" on the RIAA's website. I'm talking about the kind of hackers that infiltrate the power grid computer system and just zoom around to see what all they can do, or those guys that hack credit card companies and the only thing you ever hear about it is when the companies fess up the breach several months later.
Well, there aren't many people who have the self control to hack into a system just to prove to themselves what they can do, and then never speak of it to anyone. The whole point is to gain notoriety in the social circles that thrive on this sort of thing. The people who do this kind of stuff can cover their tracks, but these people also cannot keep their mouths shut about it--I mean, why else steal the Half-Life 2 code except for bragging rights?
Here's a good message about the thing, and it basically parallels the view I have about it:
http://lists.insecure.org/lists/isn/2001/Dec/0113.html
Although, if things really did happen as simply as Gabe said they did, it doesn't look like it needed the kind of hacker that gives the Mossad fits.
Haha! I tend to agree. I doubt a simple script kiddie was responsible, but from the news we've received it sounds like a script kiddie could have done it without much problem. Sounds like Valve wasn't even logging their network activity, which makes it pretty damn easy for a hacker to cover his tracks.
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