Sony vs. Valve: The Scale of a Breach

[zarx]

thismeintiel said:

zarx said:

thismeintiel said:

As I said, they took down the PSN to do a further investigation into what had happened, instead of investigating while the service was still up, which is worse.  And as pointed out by that article, it took 4 days to announce the problem, like with Valve, and both didn't know the full extent till a few days later.  So really, Valve has no pluses for their actions.

And are you ignoring what people are posting?  This is from 2 articles from the 11th:

'Valve's investigation of that incident revealed that the "the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums".' - Source

"Valve boss Gabe Newell confirmed that an investigation of the security breach revealed that the hackers also managed to access a Steam database which contained usernames, games purchased, email addresses, hashed and salted passwords, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information." - Source

This goes beyond just the forums.  And they are still investigating to figure out the full extent of the attack.  My guess is they are keeping Steam up so they won't have to worry about getting a bad name and hearing people bitch about not being able to access their games.

No it took Sony 4 days to announce the hack claiming they were bring down the service to fix damage, it took a week to let people know that information was comprimised which was the important thing so people could take steps like changing passwords. Hence the difference.

I never denied that things other than the forums were comprimised just that so far Steam accounts themselves were not comprimised or at least there is no evidence they were, just the forum accounts. Hence why they haven't brought down Steam not that there would be any advantage to bringing it down anyway the damage has been done and they already brought down and rebooted the point of attack.

Yea, and it took Valve 4 days to say they were hacked, as well. Then it took a day more before they realized that more vital info may have been compromised.  Plus, they are still investigating.  It could turn out worse than they thought.  Point is, the timeframe isn't that different from Sony's.

The advantage of taking it down is to investigate everything without extra activity, while at the same time implementing new security measures to make sure it doesn't happen again.  If they aren't going to do that, what's to stop hackers from doing it again?  And of course some Steam accounts were comprimised.  The hackers used info they got from the forums to hack into an actual Steam database with credit card info and billing addresses.  That info is not required from you when you join a forum.

You miss the point they brought down the forums while they investigated as that is where the attack was targeted so there is no benefit in bringing down the Steam service it's self. The database that was accessed was linked to the Steam account list but didn't contain the Steam account passwords etc which is why they haven't asked people to change their Steam passwords unless it's the same as the forum password. Not everything is in one database, they do know that the databases with forum passwords etc was comprimised and that the database containing financial reccords (including credit card info) tied to steam accounts was accessed but there is currently no evidence of what if anything was taken from said database but given the time that the hackers had access and the other activities probably not a lot could possiby have been taken according to some analyst I read. Not like the multi stage attack on Sony.

It is bad but it's still nowhere near the Sony attacks yet