Half-Life 2 Source Code Leaked, Seriously

[Bond]

This is from a Half-Life 2 employee:

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 a 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, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. 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

Sucks to be Gabe.

[Jonbo298]

Outlook seems to be part of the problem also. *gasp* I never would've thought Microsoft would be involved (somewhat).

But I've read about this somewhere. Sucks, but thankfully they have backups.

[Happydude]

whats a source code/tree again? i forgot

[GiMpY-wAnNaBe]

Originally Posted by happydude666

whats a source code/tree again? i forgot

source code = C/C++/C# code (assuming thats what thier writing it in)
now, what this means is that depending on how much code was stolen, if this code is given widely over the internet, games can be written with use of the Halflife 2 engine with no royalties going to Valve software(i believe they wrote the engine for the game), either that or all the skins can be changed, given a different title, and be sold off by anyone.....so basically windows f*cked them over

[Null]

Originally Posted by GiMpY-wAnNaBe

source code = C/C++/C# code (assuming thats what thier writing it in)
now, what this means is that depending on how much code was stolen, if this code is given widely over the internet, games can be written with use of the Halflife 2 engine with no royalties going to Valve software(i believe they wrote the engine for the game), either that or all the skins can be changed, given a different title, and be sold off by anyone.....so basically windows f*cked them over

yes it was C++ from what i've heard. And no, no one would use the code and sell a game off it. Its too risky. yes they could but highly doubful anyone would.
and from what i heard it wasnt 'all' and it was only code so no skins models maps. etc. no one could compile the code or anything.
Alittle more worrysome is the off chance that someone can understand it (VERY FEW who would have the code would truely understand it) and write some hacks / cheats / things of that nature for use when the game comes out.

This will most likely delay the game till 2004 as Valve will most likely rework some of the code to change some things. Its a setback, and its a shame it happened. But it has happened with other games in the past. i believe the Quake1 source code got leaked. People turn it into too big of a deal, its not THAT big.

[Jason1]

I read about this. I cant believe a game of such high-caliber would let their source code get leaked. I really hope its not delayed til 2004, I was looking foward to some HL2 action on Christmas morning.