Valve’s Steam software allowed users to view personal information in a privacy breach glitch during the current Winter sale.
Valve’s Steam software allowed users to view personal information in a privacy breach glitch during the current Winter sale.
Boxing day is synonmomous with swarms of customers seeking to cash in on big discounts but Valve’s popular annual Winter Sale experienced more than just a large volume of traffic to the store. As well as server timeout delays, it’s understood that the Steam servers enountered a glitch which allowed members to view other members personal information. Although this technical error has been fixed, Kotaku liased with Steam and recieved a statement from them stating that:
Steam is back up and running without any known issues. As a result of a configuration change earlier today, a caching issue allowed some users to randomly see pages generated for other users for a period of less than an hour. This issue has since been resolved. We believe no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information and no additional action is required by users.
The personal data which was viewable included: username, email address, purchase history and Steam Wallet. Sadly, the protection tools which Valve currently use to provide two-step verfication failed to effectively work during this glitch.
Thankfully everything is now back to normal but just how many of the 120 milion currently active users were affected remains unknown.
