Slashdot - Valve servers hacked through other party servers

[Ahnteis]

Slashdot has a bit up about the source theft inspired by the recent Guardian article.

from the who-what-where dept.
Thanks to The Guardian for its article providing further details on the arrest of the Half-Life 2 code thieves, with Valve's Gabe Newell explaining: "Through conversations with this individual, [we] had convinced him to fly out to us in Seattle for a job interview. The plan was changed so German authorities would do the arrests on German soil." These facts seem to coincide with allegations that the Phatbot trojan writer also stole the Half-Life 2 code, leading to "Axel G"'s arrest in May by German authorities following FBI tips. Although unconfirmed, one can also presume the previously mentioned smoking gun to be an "incriminating information" packed IRC log, revealing the source of the intrusion as the webservers of a wearable computing firm with links to Valve, on a machine likely housed in the same physical location as the Valve offices, explaining the hacker's comments that he gained entry via "a PC in Valve's net, that wasnt directly controlled by Valve."

(emphasis added)

That last bit of info is new, and a nice slap-in-the-face for the people who blamed it all on use of outlook (which I hate BTW).

Anyway, figured it might be of some interest to folks here. (When we're not worrying about the Doom3 release.)

 

[SMT]

Good eye, Ahnteis. I'd be interested to hear a better explanation of that, but I'm sure that arrested hackers are rather sullen and reticent. Very interesting, though.

 

[Gunner]

I like your quote by the way Ahnteis. Seems you haven't forgotten hehe.

 

[FISKER_Q]

According to a mail sent from Gabe Newell to me, after pointing out some suspects. I was told that Outlook was a bad guess, and that it was instead related to their email server.

He might've used the other computer as a relay or proxy, after sniffing/cracking the information from the email server.

 

[pixartist]

i KNEW it was the virus programmer...the german media of course said that he was just arrested because of programming this virus...

 

[Shuzer]

Er, actually, that was revealed in Gabe's "well, this sucks." post.. I've tried telling people this MULTIPLE MULTIPLE times, but they didn't care.