Half-Life 2 Source Code Leaked

Post by **Derek** » Thu Oct 02, 2003 9:39 pm

The source code of Half-Life 2 was stolen from Valve's computers and has been circulating the net for a little while now. Valve is not very happy, to say the least.

Gabe Newell's (Valve's Managing Director) statement

http://halflife2.homelan.com/forums/sho ... adid=10692

Gabe Newell wrote: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

InactiveX · Post by **InactiveX** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 11:06 am

They must be #*%£ing furious about this.

kuun · Post by **kuun** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 11:11 am

dude, thats crap

i hate hackers... the ones who steal and break stuff >:|

hyperspace · Post by **hyperspace** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 11:56 am

WhiteHats => good

BlackHats => very bad

the_flames · Post by **the_flames** » Sun Oct 05, 2003 4:49 pm

whats the point of taking the code, it's not liek anyone could make an game from it without big legal costs ... the only people who could benifit for a while could be the cheets, but taking the code to cheet seems a bit extreame!

johnli · Post by **johnli** » Sun Oct 05, 2003 5:46 pm

To show that it could be done, mostly. It's a real shame, though apparently it's not why the release was delayed. It essentially opens up Valve to all sorts of lawsuits from the people who liscensed technology to them (such as the physics engine being used), with whom they've no doubt signed NDAs and the like.
It also lets developers get an insight in to what are no doubt Valve's "Trade Secrets" - their AI functions and so on. While they can't reproduce them word for word, they can see the logic behind them - and it would be very hard to argue that someone has stolen the logic from somwhere else (thus the risk in a trade secret as opposed to a patent - another topic).
This thread on the halflife2.net forums sums it up rather well.