IMPORTANT FOR STEAM USERS. DID NOT HEAR ABOUT THIS.

Hakija · Dec 30, 2015

Lardaltef · Dec 30, 2015

i know some hacking group took their servers down christmas day. but as to payment? don't have paypal or any cards linked to my steam. so meh. the email? it's one of 3 i actively use and it's not even my personal one anymore. it's turned into mostly spam. so for me it's meh. don't think i bought anything that day. but still good to know.

Aspius · Dec 31, 2015

I was active during this time and I was making a purchase when this happend so someone might have seen my info. I have no idea but I have been following this rather closely.

From what I understand, the only ones who are at risk where those that was active when this happened.

The worst though is that they said nothing about it. The only info about what was happening was coming from unofficial sites. When this started and I tried to find out what was happening I found nothing until I stumbled upon a reddit thread that explained everything.

Valve said nothing about it until a couple hours later when they confirmed that it had been a caching error caused by some changes they had done. That was told to an unofficial gaming site. Nothing from any of the official accounts or webbsite.

Could someone rename this thread to "Steam Holiday sale 2015 caching error" or something like that. Just to make it more clear what this thread is about.

Derak Darksun · Dec 31, 2015

Yeah the real issue with this, and I agree with the video, is that Steam is a multibillion dollar retailer that lost private user information, and they've neither acknowledged it in an official statement or made any effort to warn people while it was happening. We definitely need to stop giving Valve/Steam a pass just because they run a DRM service we tolerate and occasionally make good games; we didn't give Target a pass, we didn't give Sony a pass, and we sure as hell wouldn't give a company like Ubisoft or EA passes if this happened on U-Don'tPlay or Horrigin.

Aspius · Dec 31, 2015

Exactly. I want steam to be as good as it can be and for that we need to be hard on them. We can't let something like this just pass.

Accidentally leaking personal information is a crime in many countries and that is what have happened here.

I recommend that you watch the video if you want to know more about it.

Lardaltef · Dec 31, 2015

Wonder if the screwup by steam had anything to do with the hacker group that shut down their servers and somehow caused them (steam) to screw up. also EAs servers were shut down on christmas day.

that is pretty much what they said actually.

Valve has finally apologized for last week’s Steam Christmas disaster, explaining in a lengthy statement today that the issues stemmed from a Denial of Service attack and wound up exposing the information of around 34,000 users.

Valve said they’re still working to identify the affected users and will contact them once the process is complete.

On Friday afternoon, December 25, users on Steam found that the digital network had malfunctioned, causing other people’s account information to show up in the store and settings. This lasted around an hour before Valve shut down Steam and fixed the problem. But issues with Steam have lingered, and as of yesterday Valve had remained mum on exactly what happened and how many people were affected.

Today, Valve broke everything down, explaining that they’d been hit by multiple DoS attacks that have caused a wide variety of issues. In an attempt to thwart some of the attacks, Valve inadvertently caused a caching malfunction that exposed some users’ personal information.

“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,” the company wrote. “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.”

Here’s the full statement, via Steam:

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.
Click to expand...

article is on kotaku from yesterday.

actual steam page on this.

so TLDR is while they were attempting to stop the attacks they screwed up something dealing with the caching. sounds like a partner company was the one that actually screwed up not valve itself.

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