Today a sobering message awaited visitors logging into the Steam service, confirming that the recent intrusions on the Steam forums may have had far reaching effects. The breach has allegedly moved beyond the forums, and has potentially exposed a wealth of user data to the intruders, including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses, and encrypted credit card information.
Yep, that’s some serious stuff. There hasn’t been any evidence that cards have come under fire at this time, but Steam users are encouraged to keep an eye on their credit card activity.
Here’s the full letter, straight from the Gabe himself:
Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users:
Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.
We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.
We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.
While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.
We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.
We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.
I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.
Gabe.
This is hardly the first time one of these situations has occurred, so before flipping out and canceling your card and throwing your PC into the river, simply change your Steam password and keep an eye on future developments.
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