Rumour: Steam Hacking Scandal Rewards Gamers With Games!

UPDATE NOV 12 8:27 UK: Gabe has replied to my email… and has confirmed it is fake. No free games sadly for all you steam players. Well not yet anyway.

Some gamers may of noticed that earlier this week, Steam forums were taken down due to hacker attack. Sadly even though the forums were compromised so was the server containing user credit cards and user information, but according to Valve, there is every possibility that Credit Card information was stolen but there’s no evidence to confirm it. Value sent a warning message to all steam users about this issue.

“We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders,”
In a recent email response to from Valves Gabe Newell stated that Portal 2 and DOTA 2 will be for free for the gamers that had accounts during the attacks.

 

Update: We have just emailed Gabe to see if the information is true. At this moment in time take it as a rumour untill we get more information.

If you login to steam you will also see this message from Gabe.

“Yesterday, on November 10, 2011, the following message was sent to all users via a Steam message.

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.”

It’s nice of Gabe and the Valve team to reward us with free games, I just hope no one is spending my hard earned cash.