Half-Life 2 Source Code Leaked

BadAsh · Post by **BadAsh** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 3:15 pm

Well it's official, the source-code for halflife2 and a few other Valve projects was stolen from them. The leaked source also supposedly contained source-code for their steam network.

Basically what this means is that HL2 may end up being hacked even worse than the first one. Which is going to suck.

Hopefully this won't push back release anymore but if it does I hope it allows them to render the leak useless.

Either way this makes me doubt whether HL2 and CS2 will be any good for competition play, since the hackers will have the original source code to build their wallhacks/aimbots from it will make it very hard to curb cheating.

Post by **I.D.O.** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 3:27 pm

I was just getting ready to post this... hehe.... Here is the supposed official word from Gabe at Valve!!

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

I agree with Badash if this is true!! Which will really PISS ME OFF since I have been looking forward to this game. (Like a million other ppl... hehe)

Good job on posting Badash....

I.D.O.

XoR · Post by **XoR** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 6:41 pm

Well, we know why HL2 is delayed now.

Yes, this indeed sucks.

I'm not sure what they are going to do now, as every online tournament or clan match will have an elephant in the living room. What to do? I guess the responsible thing to do is consider the whole project compromised, and redo the entire codebase from scratch. (easy for a chump like me to say)

Artwork, models, sounds etc ... that work of course remains the same. But the network code and such should be rehashed. I would bet that at the end of the day, it would be stronger code ... only it would be the year 2007.

Black hats ruin the day yet again. All we can hope is the guy is caught and prosecuted. The saddest part, is this punk is most likely extremely proud of this act. And because of this ego, I have no doubt that this fruitcake will be caught -- but the executioner's axe has already cut off the head of next year's biggest game.

Undead_Mercenary · Post by **Undead_Mercenary** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 8:10 am

A very intricate use of vocabulary, Lord XoR *bows*

Dr.Death · Post by **Dr.Death** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 8:50 am

Yes indeed, Lord Xor *Death also bows*

BadAsh · Post by **BadAsh** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 10:53 am

Let's hope they can rework the netcode well enough by the holidays that it will allow this game to be played competatively. As for the delay I don't think this was the cause, I heard 2 months ago that they were going to delay it till the holidays, still they should've announced it more than a couple of weeks before the scheduled ship date.