Valve Finally Explains and Apologizes for Christmas Steam Incident

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It has been nearly five days since Steam users’ personal information was revealed to random, unauthorized viewers due to a caching incident on Steam. And while the problem is long since fixed, the Steam community has been demanding an explanation and an apology.

As they mentioned in their earlier explanation, the breach had to deal with a caching issue on Valve’s end but was largely due to a series of DoS attacks levied against Steam. The explanation below touches on what exactly was available to be seen and who was affected — those online during the incident. Last, but not least, Valve apologized for the incident and said they are working together with their caching partner to identify all affected users.

Check out the full apology below:

What happened
On December 25th, a configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store pages generated for other users. Between 11:50 PST and 13:20 PST store page requests for about 34k users, which contained sensitive personal information, may have been returned and seen by other users.

The content of these requests varied by page, but some pages included a Steam user’s billing address, the last four digits of their Steam Guard phone number, their purchase history, the last two digits of their credit card number, and/or their email address. These cached requests did not include full credit card numbers, user passwords, or enough data to allow logging in as or completing a transaction as another user.

If you did not browse a Steam Store page with your personal information (such as your account page or a checkout page) in this time frame, that information could not have been shown to another user.

Valve is currently working with our web caching partner to identify users whose information was served to other users, and will be contacting those affected once they have been identified. As no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information, no additional action is required by users.

How it happened
Early Christmas morning (Pacific Standard Time), the Steam Store was the target of a DoS attack which prevented the serving of store pages to users. Attacks against the Steam Store, and Steam in general, are a regular occurrence that Valve handles both directly and with the help of partner companies, and typically do not impact Steam users. During the Christmas attack, traffic to the Steam store increased 2000% over the average traffic during the Steam Sale.

In response to this specific attack, caching rules managed by a Steam web caching partner were deployed in order to both minimize the impact on Steam Store servers and continue to route legitimate user traffic. During the second wave of this attack, a second caching configuration was deployed that incorrectly cached web traffic for authenticated users. This configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store responses which were generated for other users. Incorrect Store responses varied from users seeing the front page of the Store displayed in the wrong language, to seeing the account page of another user.

Once this error was identified, the Steam Store was shut down and a new caching configuration was deployed. The Steam Store remained down until we had reviewed all caching configurations, and we received confirmation that the latest configurations had been deployed to all partner servers and that all cached data on edge servers had been purged.

We will continue to work with our web caching partner to identify affected users and to improve the process used to set caching rules going forward. We apologize to everyone whose personal information was exposed by this error, and for interruption of Steam Store service.


Posted:
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: http://www.dualshockers.com/2015/12/30/valve-finally-explains-and-apologizes-for-christmas-steam-caching-incident/

Comments

"Valve Finally Explains and Apologizes for Christmas Steam Incident" :: Login/Create an Account :: 35 comments

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Index_AddictPosted:

I use steam and have well over a couple hundred games but haven't been on for a month or so due to my xbox one :P needless to say I was fine when this happened

kiddingPosted:

glad i don't use steam i'll just stick to my xbox lmao.

XboxPosted:

This just seems sketchy to me.

Glad I don't use this.

neboPosted:

Evoque
Nebokenozo
Evoque
Nebokenozo If it was a DoS attack I don't see why Valve has to be berated for this, other than a kind of late response to the users. It's not like anything bad was actually done. So what, someone saw some numbers they couldn't do anything with and an address that most likely doesn't reside remotely near them. What're they gonna do?


Well you've been living under a rock.

Heard of social engineering?

... Kids now a days


explain how having 2 digits of a credit card and be exploited


If a steam user had a item in their basket they could see other details.
i.e their full email address, name and address.

That's why.

Explain how those can be used to exploit someone then

DanielPosted:

Good that they are apologizing but i wasnt bothered by this as i dont have steam.

vLunaPosted:

Well hopefully everyone can move forward now..

322Posted:

Robbed Tbh this probably ruined christmas for a lot of people so they should apologize


wow such an insightful post, thanks for that. tbh you probably have half a brain. How could it ruin Christmas for anyone? Nothing could be done with the cached info.

They messed up but it hardly would ruin Christmas. But you know, clearly you gotta get that mvc badge.

LinearPosted:

Evoque
Nebokenozo If it was a DoS attack I don't see why Valve has to be berated for this, other than a kind of late response to the users. It's not like anything bad was actually done. So what, someone saw some numbers they couldn't do anything with and an address that most likely doesn't reside remotely near them. What're they gonna do?


Well you've been living under a rock.

Heard of social engineering?

... Kids now a days


I'd love to see you gain any kind of access with a name and address.

RobbedPosted:

Tbh this probably ruined christmas for a lot of people so they should apologize

KaizalaPosted:

Nebokenozo
Evoque
Nebokenozo If it was a DoS attack I don't see why Valve has to be berated for this, other than a kind of late response to the users. It's not like anything bad was actually done. So what, someone saw some numbers they couldn't do anything with and an address that most likely doesn't reside remotely near them. What're they gonna do?


Well you've been living under a rock.

Heard of social engineering?

... Kids now a days


explain how having 2 digits of a credit card and be exploited


If a steam user had a item in their basket they could see other details.
i.e their full email address, name and address.

That's why.