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
ANswer: Gabe emailed everyone that wanted to talk to him.
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1298&perpage=15&pagenumber=1)
Now the general user, you & me, doesn't care about the importance of mail headers & trailers. But the hacker sees this as doorways. So they set up a backtrail & find the ISP, log the networking on the ISP (don't ask me how), & find the timeline they are looking for, and see the IP. Once they have that, they can gain access through the net.
The problem Valve's Gabe Newell made in my opinion, this isn't for sure fact, was that although he is a really really cool guy & people like him from a gamer stand point & he talks to the gamers, was that he was emailing from a non-secure system on the same LAN as the rest of Valve's computers. This is just plain stupid. It is asking for trouble. Let's say that we have this really smart carmack-like coder that is just itching for Halflife2 & he hates steam & he is really completely pissed off that HL2 is going to be postponed. He could be a fan. He could ask a very obvious question just to get a response & then trace it back & infiltrate the system.
The point I'm trying to make is that I think that Gabe, although very cool to talk to his fans, was a dipshit moron & had no idea and no clue that idiots are on the net & will fuck you given the chance. I think that some fuckwad was pissed & learned how to piss up the rope of Gabe's email account. Pretty foolish for Gabe to be talking on the same connection that the source code was on in the first place. Seperate that shit! Talk to people, man that is soo cool, but be smart!
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1298&perpage=15&pagenumber=1)
Now the general user, you & me, doesn't care about the importance of mail headers & trailers. But the hacker sees this as doorways. So they set up a backtrail & find the ISP, log the networking on the ISP (don't ask me how), & find the timeline they are looking for, and see the IP. Once they have that, they can gain access through the net.
The problem Valve's Gabe Newell made in my opinion, this isn't for sure fact, was that although he is a really really cool guy & people like him from a gamer stand point & he talks to the gamers, was that he was emailing from a non-secure system on the same LAN as the rest of Valve's computers. This is just plain stupid. It is asking for trouble. Let's say that we have this really smart carmack-like coder that is just itching for Halflife2 & he hates steam & he is really completely pissed off that HL2 is going to be postponed. He could be a fan. He could ask a very obvious question just to get a response & then trace it back & infiltrate the system.
The point I'm trying to make is that I think that Gabe, although very cool to talk to his fans, was a dipshit moron & had no idea and no clue that idiots are on the net & will fuck you given the chance. I think that some fuckwad was pissed & learned how to piss up the rope of Gabe's email account. Pretty foolish for Gabe to be talking on the same connection that the source code was on in the first place. Seperate that shit! Talk to people, man that is soo cool, but be smart!
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