I need the assistance of the community

[Gabe Newell]

Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve.

Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.
Here is what we know:

1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by
looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.
2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to
find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.

3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.

4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.

5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to
infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).

6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of 0 variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and
at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.

Well, this sucks.

What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send
information to, [email protected]. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of
our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you
can point us in the right direction, that would be great.

We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to
help us take care of these problems than this community.

Gabe

_____________
Gabe Newell

[AnjoIsTaken]

wait are you the real gabe newell or you a troll?

[Gabe Newell]

wait are you the real gabe newell or you a troll?

It's me gabe newell, yeah

[AnjoIsTaken]

[bart]

No More Alt Bro. if i spot more alts YOU ARE GOING DOWN SON,... ya hear?