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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PolygonPosted:

The wierdest thing was refreshing and ending up in some russians account with some NEKOPARA shit in their basket.

ZooklaPosted:

Took them a while but here it is i guess, atleast it's fixed

CongenitalPosted:

Evoque
Urf
Nebokenozo
gtapro151
Nebokenozo
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


email could be spammed with fake forgot password links to legitimate looking steam sites.


You should be fine unless you're retarded


Even then you have to be digging inside your spam folder to find those emails and there is STILL a giant red banner saying "MIGHT BE FAKE!" at the top of the page


It's called social engineering as I said.

So if I could get someones name and email address from steam :



Urf
Nebokenozo
gtapro151
Nebokenozo
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


email could be spammed with fake forgot password links to legitimate looking steam sites.


You should be fine unless you're retarded


Even then you have to be digging inside your spam folder to find those emails and there is STILL a giant red banner saying "MIGHT BE FAKE!" at the top of the page


As said before... social engineering.

Name, address and email address for example.
You could first find out their social media accounts.
From here you could find relations, schools, pets ect
With this is mind you can perform other operations like trying to get into the email accounts.
E.g Recovery question - where was your mother born. You could find this information out.

You can cancel phone/internet bills..... ECT

Steam went against the UK law of the data protection act, simple as that.


This guy is right, the info they had, is enough to social engineer to find out more info.

CongenitalPosted:

Does anyone know if it was actually Lizard Squad who attacked Steam? (Not cache errors, the DOS)

ProPosted:

At least they sorted out the issues that they was experiencing.

Joyful-Posted:

Steam situating problems are always nice, It shows that they really do care.

junoPosted:

Well at least it isn't a problem anymore.

MickersPosted:

Glad they got it sorted as soon as they could.

SkyPosted:

yeah this sucke really bad , good that it is fixed now .

neboPosted:

Evoque
Urf
Nebokenozo
gtapro151
Nebokenozo
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


email could be spammed with fake forgot password links to legitimate looking steam sites.


You should be fine unless you're retarded


Even then you have to be digging inside your spam folder to find those emails and there is STILL a giant red banner saying "MIGHT BE FAKE!" at the top of the page


It's called social engineering as I said.

So if I could get someones name and email address from steam :



Urf
Nebokenozo
gtapro151
Nebokenozo
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


email could be spammed with fake forgot password links to legitimate looking steam sites.


You should be fine unless you're retarded


Even then you have to be digging inside your spam folder to find those emails and there is STILL a giant red banner saying "MIGHT BE FAKE!" at the top of the page


As said before... social engineering.

Name, address and email address for example.
You could first find out their social media accounts.
From here you could find relations, schools, pets ect
With this is mind you can perform other operations like trying to get into the email accounts.
E.g Recovery question - where was your mother born. You could find this information out.

You can cancel phone/internet bills..... ECT

Steam went against the UK law of the data protection act, simple as that.


What, so the email service can send a verification code to another email or phone that you don't have? It's not that deep