Valve officially talks about the Steam Winter Sale account fiasco.

[vivster]

RadiantDanceMachine said:

vivster said:

I work in IT and things like this happen all the time. You won't see it often because usually there are a lot of safeguards in place but it happens and is especially easy to happen in rushed scenarios like this.

The fault is still on them though and an honest mistake does not safe you from responsibility.

I still laugh at anybody who believes this could've been prevented with more money.

If things like this happen all the time at your company your IT personnel are fucking garbage. My goodness, if this happened at my company with any semblance of regularity we'd be hit with more fines than could be sustained. The integrity of information like this is of utmost importance.

It happens everywhere, of course not in this scale and most of the time without other people noticing it, but mistakes happen at EVERY IT company. Doesn't matter if they're Valve, Google or Microsoft. The IT personal is only human and current IT networks are too complex for any human to grasp completely in its entirety.

The point is, things like this are hardly preventable and especially not by throwing money at it.