Silent Nights
::Jerry Seinfeld voice:: So how about that Steam fiasco?!
Over Christmas, Steam gave hundreds of users access to random accounts, allowing them to view purchase and billing information of random strangers. Valve clarified to the press that the issue was resolved later that day, and that “only cached information was viewable” and that “no further action was required.”
Oh ok, so that’s that, then! Not.
With a breach like this with valuable and private information on public display (including the last four digits of credit card numbers, which can be used to socially engineer multiple accounts across the web, and email addresses), more than a mere few sentence response is required. Users out there (myself included) are still wondering how this happened, why it happened, and what Valve is going to to do prevent it in the future. Instead, we’ve had several days of silence.
It’s hard to believe that nearly everyone at this multi-million dollar company is on leave, and that someone can’t issue a detailed statement of what happened. But as Kotaku points out, this is par for the course for Valve, and a lack of transparency is nothing new. Users on the Steam reddit are also upset, and the following help ticket, acquired by Kotaku, kind of sums up what people are going through right now.
We’re waiting for a real explanation, Valve.
