Steve Kovach December 30, 2015 at 11:54AM
Valve Software says its Steam store was hit with a denial of service (DoS) attack on Christmas Day last week, which exposed personal information for thousands of its customers.
A DoS attack is a coordinated attack where people flood a site's servers with bogus traffic in order to bring it down. It's the web traffic equivalent of shooting a fire hose into a cup of water.
Never heard of Steam? It's the App Store for PC games. It's the number one place people go to for the latest PC games, updates, and extra content. Steam has over 125 million users. It's kind of a big deal!
In this case, the DoS attack on the Steam store caused an issue that caused users to see other profiles when they logged in. The profiles showed email addresses, physical addresses, game purchases, and a few digits of credit card numbers belonging to other users.
Valve said it saw a 2,000% increase in traffic on Christmas day, which caused the issue. That's a far from normal traffic spike — it was caused by the DoS attack.
Valve ended up taking the Steam store down for a few hours, which fixed the problem. Later that day, Valve blamed a "configuration change" for the caching issue. Now we know the real cause was actually a malicious attack on Steam. So far, no one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Here's the full announcement from Steam released Wednesday:
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.
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