Gaming Steam is being odd and allowing people to access others accounts

Big news, but I'm trying to sleep off my Xmas dinner. Be careful, chaps.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2015/12/25/steamhaywire/1

 

STEAM down and XBOX live down, well big hairy bollocks, Merry xmas everyone

 

This only goes to prove that half life 3 is due out next year!

 

I am pissed that it took them more than an hour to pull the plug and turn off the servers. Sensible information including billing data sufficient to impersonate the user are stored in most profiles and have been compromised, so turning off the servers to prevent more data leakage should have been priority 1, holiday or not.

 

Yeah i agree if that is the case but last XMAS i had similar with the XBOX live carry on. Maybe cannot be helped but the kids have games they cannot play.

 

Honestly, holiday or no holiday servers should have been pulled nearly immediately. Very very cross and when i'm back from holiday I'll be looking more into this.

 

Who cares about being unable to play games for a few hours? But the thought that some idiot might have posted my login-name, account history and payment infos to some social media website makes my blood boil. Seeing how poeple are posting "funny Russian and German accounts I can see on steam hur dur" without blacking out those infos that is actually quite likely.

So I will be spending my only free day till the end of the year changing my paypal adresses, passwords etc and try to change my login name. Fun.

Yeah, I am really pissed. Sorry.

 

Thanks for writing and posting this on Christmas day Jake.

 

It's cos i love you guys.

Kept an eye on this, looks like Steam's fixed the issues, problems are resolved. Stay vigilant and all the best. I'm sloping off back to Christmas. Have a great holiday season guys!

 

I care that my kids cannot play on Xmas day but i fully agree that precautions should be done. My anger here is at the W*****S who think it is fun to hack into a website and ruin things for others. I hope nobody has been effected by this.

 

Given the ones [that were caught at least] responsible for last year's got what amounted to a slap on the wrist and a stern telling to not to do it again, there's nothing to discourage them. So they keep doing it 'for the lulz' knowing they're unlikely to get caught and even if they are nothing of note will happen to them...

 

This sounds like more of an infrastructur/delivery issue with sessions being shared than a hack so the fault lies with steam or akamai.

 

Would it have been anything to do with a "group" going by the name of SkidNP, apparently these kind souls were doing us all a favor.

 

Wow that's pretty poor. I haven't personally seen any emails suggesting a third party login, but then again this bug sounds like the email auth step might be skipped entirely and you simply see someone else's info!

 

Source

 

The chance of the two being unrelated is low, but it's more of a side effect. SkidNP promised they'd DDOS Steam over Xmas and they did - seems the cache thing is an unexpected side effect.

Just to say, again, nothing was compromised at any point - you were just being served other people's steam account page instead of your own. You couldn't interact with it, but you could see details. Still bad, bit not as bad as was initially feared.

 

So was it only people online simultaneously that were affected?

 

Be good to know the answer to your question.

 

Assuming it was just a caching issue, then yeah.