A few days ago I reported about the Steam forums being down for "maintenance", but today Valve have confirmed that a recent Steam hack is the result of this. The recent Steam hack may have compromised users' credit card details and other personal information according to a message sent to Steam users from Valve God, Gabe Newell.

Valve is certain hackers gained access to a database that contained encrypted information, but don't know if they took it or will be able to crack its encryption. The database that was hacked contained information such as user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, e-mail addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information.

Gabe says that Valve don't have evidence that the encrypted credit card numbers or personal info were taken by the intruders, and the company is "still investigating." He adds that there is also no evidence of credit card misuse, but implores Steam users to "watch your credit card activity and statements closely."

Hopefully as an apology they release Half-Life 3.

The full 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.

 

Gabe.