Steam got hacked/glitched, accounts are accessible by anyone randomly


Ouch, this is a very painful breach for a lot of people.

Glad I'm not on steam. It really highlights the risks of placing personal information in the cloud.
 
There's still no info about anything getting hacked (yet), so far there's just speculations about a glitch in Steam's cache servers.
Eitherway, if anyone here have their bank info (via either Credit Card or PayPal) associated with Steam, i advice you to check your bank accounts. There seem to be unwanted purchases being made for some because of this glitch (no reason to panic though, there's still no solid confirmation for this as of right now): http://is.gd/pypuKc

EDIT: Here's more info: http://is.gd/tpnV9N

 
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So... I don't even remember how I got the games I payed on steam, if there's a menu somewhere with paypal info I can't even find it... anyway paypal always asks for a password too when used...

but to be more sure I canceled the steampowered site directly from paypal...

Anyway I never "configured" a profile for the steam community
 
If you never used your Credit Card directly to pay for anything on Steam, then you probably didn't associate any info directly with your account (IIRC), de-authorizing preaproved payments with Steam through PayPal should suffice for now.
Eitherway, whenever this gets resolved and the server shenanigans ceace, check your account information on Steam to see that there's indeed nothing saved on it.
 
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What? Right on xmas? Haha great for them as I think they can get by without trouble on a demo day or two of everything! ;)
 
... check your account information on Steam to see that there's indeed nothing saved on it.

Actually if it's a cache issue, I suppose it is better I not open that page at all, so the server don't have to load it
 
Exactly. This is information exposure triggered by their caching server. No one can buy stuff on your account, they can just possibly see some information, including your email address and last 4 digits of your credit card. It's not the worst security breach in history, fairly tame really, but still best to have avoided.
Fortunately they addressed the problem fairly quickly and it has been fixed already.
 
Actually if it's a cache issue, I suppose it is better I not open that page at all, so the server don't have to load it
That's why i said "whenever this gets resolved and the server shenanigans ceace", as in whenever it gets fixed (which should have been done already as of this post).

No one can buy stuff on your account, they can just possibly see some information, including your email address and last 4 digits of your credit card. It's not the worst security breach in history, fairly tame really, but still best to have avoided.
There were people claiming that purchases have been triggured via preaproved PayPal payments, although i can't say anything solid confirmed this (Vavle did state it was probably not possible).
Eitherway, whatever info was leaked could still potentially be used for social engineering, so i would suggest anyone to keep an eye on any weird activity if personal info was kept on their Steam account.
 
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That's why i said "whenever this gets resolved and the server shenanigans ceace", as in whenever it gets fixed (which should have been done already as of this post).

Right, I was so happy with my new power to modify quotes that I overused it :p
 
In the video that Night posted, they speculate that it might be a result of a DDOS attack. Is that why Steam Community is offline?
 
ouch... what a major fuckup. Glad that I bought all my steam keys via the humble bundle store. If this is just a glitch, then good luck to the idiots who were responsible finding another job.
 
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We'd like to follow up with more information regarding Steam's troubled Christmas.

What happened

On December 25th, a configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store pages generated for other users. Between 11:50 PST and 13:20 PST store page requests for about 34k users, which contained sensitive personal information, may have been returned and seen by other users.

The content of these requests varied by page, but some pages included a Steam user’s billing address, the last four digits of their Steam Guard phone number, their purchase history, the last two digits of their credit card number, and/or their email address. These cached requests did not include full credit card numbers, user passwords, or enough data to allow logging in as or completing a transaction as another user.

If you did not browse a Steam Store page with your personal information (such as your account page or a checkout page) in this time frame, that information could not have been shown to another user.

Valve is currently working with our web caching partner to identify users whose information was served to other users, and will be contacting those affected once they have been identified. As no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information, no additional action is required by users.

How it happened

Early Christmas morning (Pacific Standard Time), the Steam Store was the target of a DoS attack which prevented the serving of store pages to users. Attacks against the Steam Store, and Steam in general, are a regular occurrence that Valve handles both directly and with the help of partner companies, and typically do not impact Steam users. During the Christmas attack, traffic to the Steam store increased 2000% over the average traffic during the Steam Sale.

In response to this specific attack, caching rules managed by a Steam web caching partner were deployed in order to both minimize the impact on Steam Store servers and continue to route legitimate user traffic. During the second wave of this attack, a second caching configuration was deployed that incorrectly cached web traffic for authenticated users. This configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store responses which were generated for other users. Incorrect Store responses varied from users seeing the front page of the Store displayed in the wrong language, to seeing the account page of another user.

Once this error was identified, the Steam Store was shut down and a new caching configuration was deployed. The Steam Store remained down until we had reviewed all caching configurations, and we received confirmation that the latest configurations had been deployed to all partner servers and that all cached data on edge servers had been purged.

We will continue to work with our web caching partner to identify affected users and to improve the process used to set caching rules going forward. We apologize to everyone whose personal information was exposed by this error, and for interruption of Steam Store service.

http://store.steampowered.com/news/19852

I wonder where they got the 37k number or the 77k number for the hacked Steam accounts not long ago. Are they made up to calm down people while disregarding a potentially much bigger real number?
 
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Well in this case they could look for the list of all users who accessed the steam store during the required caching window. If you didn't access it during that time then none of your pages should be cached and if you did access then there is the potential someone else could have seen your information
 
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