10 November 2011
Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users:

Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.

We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.

We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.

While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.

We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.

We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.

I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

Gabe.

Somehow I feel even this message is written by the hacker on behalf of our little Gabe.

If the hacker really had accessed the Steam database, this incident is more serious than most customers previously predicted, and not only the users of the forum are affected, every Steam user are in different level of shit because their billing information are leaked. Gabe should notify all Steam users in email, in Steam advertisement, and public channels, instead of writing a vBulletin board message in the broken SPUF.

If this message is really from Gabe, then I'm worrying about the future of Valve because he is still counting how many Steam accounts are leaked and hoping there's only a handful of them. According to the history, hackers do not put up a message tell you 'I'm here, you are owned' before they had obtained a complete copy of user database; so usually when you notice the user database is compromised, all user information had leaked, you don't even need to investigate.