Half-Life 2 Source Code Leaked

[St1cky]

Source: Planet Half-Life

We were going to hold off on reporting on this until there was official word from Valve, but now Slashdot is reporting (by way of GamersWithJobs) that at least some of the Half-Life 2 source code has leaked.

Later on it was confirmed to be real

Gabe Newell confirmed it later saying that they had noticed suspicous activity recently...

1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.
2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.
3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.
4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.
5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).
6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.

This really sucks for Valve. This was their big release, and now it's screwed because of some hacker. I really hope this guy gets caught. Valve deserves to earn money for their 5 years of hard work on this game.

[cutty]

A bit slow on that release St1cky

Already posted here http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=249262

[Und3ertak3r]

Now I'm pissed..

[MrLinus]

armchair quarterback comments:

The one thing that I would be concerned about is why didn't they move the source after they first detected the potential attack? This is their bread and butter (proprietary info). It sounds like even after the rebuild he didn't patch for the issue and still used the open preview pane option.

I think their security geek needs to review the procedures and practices.

[Dhej]

There security geek needs 50 lashings...

It was a very slow deliberate attack, according to the stuff I've read, which should have been easily picked up via a firewall.

I mean, really, keyloggers and file servers existing on a network without administrator knowledge in this day and age..., jeeze.

Sad really.

So, from what I've heard, the code actually compiles. That isn't good for Valve. Atleast it wasn't gold master yet. That would have been really bad for them.

I can't imagine that it will take too long for them to catch the culprit, slow and deliberate is all fine and good, but keyloggers are sort of obvious. Not to mention that somebody doing something like this would have only done it for recognition, particularly since it has already popped up in news groups.

Not too bright considering how draconian US laws have become especially toward computer crime.

Such is life, if you don't stay on top of technology, you'll find yourself in sticky situations.

[kr4y3]

What sucks is my friend said, this is a dream to the folks who want to make hacks for the game and cheat. That would really suck ass. Cheaters are the reason i dont really play much CS.

[breakology]

THis ReEks of "publicity stunt" ..... but only time will tell.

[IKnowNot]

"Hackers steal entire Half-Life 2 code" from DIGIT magazine

Having five years work stolen because someone else was not parinod enough ....

I can't even imagine how I would feel or what I would do.

[chumprock]

Originally posted here by breakology
THis ReEks of "publicity stunt" ..... but only time will tell.

Totally, look at all the press they got.


First they couldn't make the September release, so they swore up and down that it would be in by Christmas. Now they have an excuse to push it back again and blame it on some ruskie hax0r.

Of course, now they are saying there was enough stolen to make a "playable version"

http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/07/comm...ming/index.htm