The worst incident in the history of video game development? (1 Viewer)

[Sam Posten]

Its true, Valve got hacked, the source code to the source engine and steam were released to the world by unknown hackers....

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/show...threadid=10692

God knows how long this will push the release back.

Sam

 

[Brian Kleinke]

Likely someone inside leaked this... not a hacker persay... though all the hackers now have it :-/

/. had some interesting things about this, looks like the CD Key stuff will have to be rewritten. I hope they find and crucify who ever did this...

 

[paul_v]

Wow that's awful. Sounds like a competitor isn't playing fair. I don't think a hacker would do this to valve on his own since most hackers are gamers and most gamers can't wait for this game to come out. I am willing to bet this hacker is a hired cyber thug

 

[KevinRB]

I'm willing to bet it wasn't.

I can't imagine any game company would be willing to risk paying someone off to leak HL2's source in hopes that it will help their own sales.

 

[ChrisMatson]

Can someone explain the impact? Does this let anyone with the code to use the game engine, do they have the whole game? Why such a big deal?

 

[Scott L]

Yea another programming noob here, why would this push the release back?

 

[BrianB]

Likely someone inside leaked this... not a hacker persay...

Did either of you read the statement by Valve? Their servers were attacked repeatedly, email accounts compromised & worms launched on their systems.

Other game companies have *nothing* to gain through attempting all this? Any programmer even looking at this source leaves themself open to legal trouble, to be honest - it's all copyrighted by Valve.

Nasty, nasty, nasty.

As to why this could cause delays or cause trouble, well, Valve have to re-write all of their security protections as they mechanism for generating/validating keys is in the source code. Additionally, it gives key advantages to the people who write cheat patches - it lets them see all of the graphics pipeline stuff, all of the occulsion code, collision code etc - lots of stuff that cheaters like to "get around" or abuse.

Additionally, it also contains the source to the third party physics library from Havok, which isn't good for Havok.

All in all, not good.

 

[Josh Lowe]

Poor security at Valve. Sucks for them, but they obviously didn't do a great job of protecting their most critical data.

I would imagine there'll be a job opening there for a network security engineer very soon.

 

[Matt Odegard]

Well, if you look at the thread it was originally posted last February. Is this still an issue?

 

[BrianB]

Matt - outside of the US, the date format is day-month-year. That date is the 2nd of October, not 10th of February.

 

[JamesHl]

It's too sophisticated to be just someone screwing around. I would guess that it's fairly likely there's a monetary motiviation here. I would be more likely to say it has something to do with the release date flap, but it seems like this attack has been going on somewhat longer.

They've also had trouble with people ddosing their Steam servers. I wonder if it's related.

 

[Sam Posten]

Brian pretty much nailed it, plus you have to remember that a BIG part of Halflife 2 was this Steam concept. Its a net based distribution system that, in concept allows pay per play and monthly subscriptions etc.

And yeah, you can definitly see the Havoc guys having to sue Valve.

And its not like Valve can just fire Gabe Newell either, if it was indeed his personal machine that got hacked. It would be like id firing/suing John Carmack...

Sam

 

[Sam Posten]

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/show...threadid=10894

Explains a lot of the code issues

Sam

 

[Jean-Michel]

And yeah, you can definitly see the Havoc guys having to sue Valve.

They won't.

 

[Rob Lutter]

WHEW! Some of you guys don't understand the MAGNITUDE of this attack. If Valve were the White House, someone just snuck in, undetected, and stole all of the president's clean underwear

 

[Sam Posten]

More like they stole the presidential seal and his security badge...

Sam

 

[JamesHl]

It's a big deal and it sucks, but in the end it's not going to kill anyone. There are some games that even release the source when they put the game out. It's not like anyone is going to use an unlicensed copy of the source engine or the havok physics engine to make their own game, havok and/or valve would sue the pants off them.

Since steam is a seperate piece of software, I don't think they will have to change too much if anything depending on how much code is required in hl2 to support it.

Probably the biggest negative repercussion of this will be that other unscrupulous developers might take bits and pieces or even chunks of source and no one would necessarily ever know, since source code is something that we generally don't get to see. As long as it's not a wholesale copy of the engine no one would ever really know.

 

[Chris Bardon]

We'll see what happens with this, but I have to say that as a developer, it'd be interesting to get a peek at the source for the game. Not to do anything malicious, but just to see how the game works.

Honestly, it was probably just someone who did it to say that they did. Sure, the keygen stuff was taken, but we all knew that this would be hacked anyway within hours of the game's release.

 

[Eugene Esterly]

Basically, IMO, Valve would probably have to totally rewrite the source code to HL2. I agree with Posten, this is one of the worst incidents in video game development because now that the HL2 source code was leaked, anybody, including Valve's competitors can use the programming routines that Valve programmed into HL2.

 

[BertFalasco]

This is very unforunate and pisses me off that we potentially may have to wait even longer.

Some odd scenario I was thinking of : What if a company decides to create a game that pretty much uses the same source code, would this brought before a judge, would a company be compelled to display the code? (Assuming companies aren't obligated to show and tell any and all codes)

-Bert