Dead Men Walking

Forum Archive 2023 => dMw Gaming => Gaming Archive => It's a game ...but it ain't got its own topic! => Topic started by: FATAL on December 17, 2003, 03:06:34 AM

Title: half-life 2
Post by: FATAL on December 17, 2003, 03:06:34 AM
i saw this and thought of you :D

QuoteHalf-Life 2 source code stolen

That’s right, hackers got into the computer at Valve Software and copied the source code to Half-Life 2. Gabe Newell of Valve Software released this statement:

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 targeted 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

At this point it is not clear whether this will delay the release of Half-Life 2 or not. Also now many portions of the game that were still being kept secret, obviously are no longer secret. Also, this will most likely allow hackers to find ways to cheat when the game is released. I would think the game will be delayed in an attempt to prevent cheating and hacking the games final release.
Title: half-life 2
Post by: ChimpBoy on December 17, 2003, 08:22:38 AM
Somebody already posted this below FATAL (in one of the half life threads) 8)