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Steam security issue revealed personal info to other users on XMas Day (fixed)

Woffls

Member
I think removing pre-authorisation from a linked PayPal account is a good idea. Don't know how it would do anything but prevent transactions from being authorised.

If this is a caching issue, then presumably we just want to avoid doing anything with our accounts, because the pages will end up being cached and, therefore, exposed. [edit] Unless you do actually manage to remove information, because that would hopefully flush out the old cached data. Seems difficult to change own settings, though, so may not be worth trying.
 

Joqu

Member
Yeah, things are down for me too now. FINALLY

Why the fuck did it take them so long?? They better give us some answers after this
 

RyanW

Member
So just to be sure, nothing can be done with the limited info that's viewable, right? And nothing can be bought by other people with your account or is that still unconfirmed?
 

Haunted

Member
I didn't get any emails from Steam Guard or Valve so it doesn't look like anyone tried anything with my account (phew), but it's damn scary to know that the information is out there and possibly accessable by someone.
 

Anteo

Member
I'm guessing if I dont do anything I should be fine? Anyways the worst they could do is get my steam email account. Passwords are different, I'm using debit card and it doenst allow for overdraft, I got like 2 dolars on it.

Can I play games?
 

BHK3

Banned
As if PSN hadn't been massively attacked and breached in the past. Take that console war shit somewhere else.

Yet every christmas everything gets taken down and shit gets slowed down on all fronts. PSN nothing was stolen, just no online for a month, chill out.
 

RoyalFool

Banned
Some people say it's a caching issue, but what's the point in caching the transaction list from a server point of view? Every user has got its unique page and I doubt it is a page with heavy traffic.

Does that mean that if I haven't visited that page in a while my account details will be safe?

Yes, and normally you have server side caching somewhere (or something like steam probably even has a proxy cache somewhere). Then when you generate a page you set a header which tells it if it's safe to cache or not. It's likely an automated update fucked part of this up so it was just caching account pages which, for the reason you say - should never need to be cached anyway.
 
e7543af2a9.png

wait wait WAT

I just cancel the aprobed payments option from my paypal account, that can't affect me, right?
 

Mr_Zombie

Member
And that's only if you don't switch to a new account by clicking any button.

That's not true. I was stuck on few accounts for several minutes (going through various pages and going back to the account details) and before someone at Valve noticed something was wrong and blocked things like buying stuff and editing profiles, god knows what could anyone do. And we already have few people in this thread who claimed that they were able to modify user's details (delete CC/PayPal) or see full account info (including full phone number).
 

trh

Nifty AND saffron-colored!
As a person who works on a large enterprise network, it's highly unlikely that they have a single button capable of shutting things down. A large-scale commercial venture like this would likely have multiple redundancies and failovers in place to prevent a single-site issue from taking down the entire thing.

If this truly is a software issue somewhere, the engineers would need the back-end systems to continue running in order to troubleshoot and correct the issue, so the answer would likely be to shut down routes in the front-end DMZ routers and/or firewalls to prevent access from the outside. And then hopefully they have some way to VPN in outside of these front-end network components, or a bunch of software guys are going to have to head on-site to fix this.

There's a clip from NCIS where two people tag-team a keyboard to stop a hacker, and the silver haired chief dude just pulls the plug instead. Valve should take a cue from the foxxy daddy and pull the plug. NCIS knows what they're doing.
 

Rival

Gold Member
It wouldn't be the holidays without a massive hack of a major gaming platform. Glad I'm just chilling watching basketball.
 
Regardless of it being Christmas day, this is a billion (or close?) dollar company. They absolutely have people working on Christmas day getting overtime. The response time was pretty bad.
 
I assume if anybody buy anything with your wallet/stored info those will be added to your library and could be refunded but I'm not sure about gifts. Can gifts be refunded?
 
Some people say it's a caching issue, but what's the point in caching the transaction list from a server point of view? Every user has got its unique page and I doubt it is a page with heavy traffic.

Does that mean that if I haven't visited that page in a while my account details will be safe?

There are some things you would routinely cache. For example, the featured section. That's not going to change per user. Even the recommended content can be tailored and cached at the same time if you bucket everyone with similar enough tastes. However, you would typically not cache transaction history, account details, etc.
 

Blanquito

Member
"This is not a security breach"

Uh, yes, yes it is. Seeing other people's information is a security breach, whether or not you can change it.

Crazy stuff. Wonder what's actually going on.
 

ChryZ

Member
Anyone who used Steam in the last few hours should assume: Steam login, account email and PayPal email leaked, all can be used for further hacks. I'm going to replace my email addresses soon.
 
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