A DISGRUNTLED Half-Life gamer claims to have hacked Valve's Steam servers and is holding the company to ransom.
The chap, calling himself Maddox, says that he is not a fan of Steam - the digital distribution system for games that Valve has pioneered - and he's acting to get Valve to fix it to his satisfaction.
To prove his point, the hacker has released screenshots onto the web of Valve's internal admin system, along with details of user accounts and tips for people to set up their own 'CyberCafe' account with Valve, a privilege usually reserved for those running, well, CyberCafes.
The screenshots do seem to be legitimate, including listings of CyberCafe accounts, error logs and a small amount of credit card data with the numbers blanked out.
The man himself told the world that "If you [Valve] want me to remove these files you can e-mail me at (address removed) and I prefer you come with something good unless you want me to expose ALL of the customers their information."
He has further threatened to put together a spreadsheet of all Valve's user base credit card data and to release it into the hack-o-sphere, which wouldn't be a pleasant experience for the millions of Valve customers that have purchased games online.
Valve is yet to publicly respond to the threat - there is zip on its website, and we can't find anything in the support forums either - but we suspect that Gabe Newell and co are talking to the police as we type.
Squirly wrote:As far as I know, you can't hack steam like that, ie: they don't store that info on the servers for exactly this reason. I think this be ****.
I was surprised when he said that there was almost no security, but you don't post something like this unless it's serious, and Steam has been silent... so who knows...
"Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings."
lol, but I doubt it.