Steam Hacked, Credit Card Numbers Taken

An anonymous reader writes "DailyTech reports that Valve's Steam content distribution system has been compromised. According to the article a hacker claims to have 'bypassed Valve's security system and accessed a significant chunk of data, including: screenshots of internal Valve web pages, a portion of Valve's Cafe directory, error logs, credit card information of customers, and financial information on Valve.'"

Comments

Check your credit cards

[Cerberus7]

I got a call today from Discover that the card I used to purchase some Steam games was used in several stores in the last two days, racking up over $1500 in charges. I've been trying to figure out how they got my number, and this seems a possible candidate. If you're a Steam customer, beware!

Re:It's an unconfirmed claim you Irish fools

[caramelcarrot]

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.p hp?t=554840

"There has been no security breach of Steam." However, he does confirm our expert's findings by adding, "The alleged hacker gained access to a third-party site that Valve uses to manage the commercial partners in its Cyber Café program. This Cyber Café billing system is not connected to Steam. We are working with law enforcement agencies on this matter, and encourage anyone with more information to e-mail us at Catch_A_Thief@valvesoftware.com."

Re:You need to store something for monthly billing

[Ford Prefect]

The issue is that the machine doing the billing must NOT be connected to the Internet.

Who says it was even Valve's machine that was compromised? 1UP.com:

Doug Lombardi, director of marketing at Valve, says, "There has been no security breach of Steam." However, he does confirm our expert's findings by adding, "The alleged hacker gained access to a third-party site that Valve uses to manage the commercial partners in its Cyber Café program. This Cyber Café billing system is not connected to Steam. We are working with law enforcement agencies on this matter, and encourage anyone with more information to e-mail us at Catch_A_Thief@valvesoftware.com."

Here's the full *original* screenshot

[TubeSteak]

http://i17.tinypic.com/2e0irza.jpg

The pic in TFA only shows the left half of the picture.

Re:Wii points?

[VertigoAce]

I think there are two main motivations for the point systems. The first is that credit card companies have a per transaction fee that is around $0.25 - $0.35. This is really significant when you want to have multiple transactions around $1 - $2 each. By having you purchase points in increments of at least $5, they only pay the transaction fee once for a series of transactions. Apple does something similar with iTunes: they collect somewhere between one and three days worth of purchases and submit them together as a single transaction, hoping you buy more than just a single $0.99 track (I've never used iTunes, so this is a summary of what I've read about its behavior).

The other reason for the points system is to be able to set a single global price for content. I can post a piece of content for 800 points and tell people about that without having to convert it to a whole bunch of other currencies. Microsoft then sells points at some constant exchange rate for each country. This keeps content prices from fluctuating everywhere outside the US (compared to making the content $10 USD and having the exchange rate vary).