Valve break silence on “that” Christmas incident

Valve has finally issued an apology over the mess that ensued on Christmas day.

I’ve waded through the post to give you the main points without all the fuss.

On Christmas Day, Steam encountered some caching problems affecting over 34,000 people. Users found that other people’s account information was suddenly visible to them. However, these details weren’t enough to pose serious account or bank security issues. If you didn’t browse your Account page or Checkout page, you’re most likely unaffected.

Valve and co. deal with DoS attacks all the time. Christmas Day saw a DoS attack – an increase of 2000% in web traffic. Caching rules are deployed to deal with these attacks, the second wave of caching configurations deployed  incorrectly cached web traffic for authenticated users. This led to users being able to see other people’s account details.

The Steam store then shut down temporarily to review these caching problems.

Valve have said that they’ll look into improving these systems in the future too and eventually contact those who may have been affected by the problems.

Here’s the original blog post  if you want the full details on the Steam fiasco.